McGuinness: The end justifies the means

EVER since his comments about their ugly win over Antrim, Pat Spillane hasn’t exactly been flavour of the month in Donegal.

His remarks about them at half-time yesterday, referring to the first-half as “Armageddon” and talk of “Shi’ite (sic) football”, will only enshrine him position as persona non grata in the county.

Jim McGuinness, though, was keen to stress the irrelevance of the brickbats aimed at his team’s style of play.

“The pundits have their opinions, the man on the street has his opinion and my job is to try and put medals in our players’ pockets. We’ve managed to do that twice this year and we were very close to an All-Ireland final. The end justifies the means and that’s just the way it is for us.

“We won’t be going to Ballybofey or Castlefinn next year when we start off training thinking how we can make Pat Spillane feel good. That won’t be our primary objective when we start training again. It will be about preparing for the Ulster championship and improving and developing the players and tweaking the game-plan.”

McGuinness admitted the area he must concentrate on now is improving his side’s offence. Reducing a team to just frees for their scores for 60 minutes of football might be resoundingly effective but scoring just six points for an entire game and failing to score for the last 29 isn’t good enough.

However, the Glenties man was making no apologies for his tactics. Even if their defensive structure drew several chorus of boos from Dublin supporters, McGuinness heard none of them.

“Everybody’s got an opinion. It’s irrelevant to us. For 19 years Donegal would have been playing a certain brand of football. It hasn’t served us well and it hasn’t brought the fellas who have put in an awful lot of work on the training field over the last 19 years the achievements they deserve.

“We never said we were the finished article. We’re a work in progress and we’re very early in our development. Moving up the next 10 or 15% is a big challenge and we have to do an awful lot of work to address that.”

McGuinness believed Karl Lacey’s substitution through injury in the 42nd minute was the turning point.

“He seemed to be punching a few holes in their defence in the first half and he carried a threat and he was obviously doing his job defensively as well as he has done all year. He is a top class player. It was a disappointment to lose him.”

McGuinness also conceded tiredness was a contributory factor for Dublin’s late scores.

“Probably a wee bit of that (tiredness) — they gave everything all year really, throughout the McKenna Cup and the league and the championship and it worked.

“They worked very hard on the training field and they tried to bring that to the competitive field as well so we’d be very happy with that.

“It was tough going out there and Dublin are probably a wee bit further down the line in conditioning compared to where we were at.”