Donegal may quit McKenna Cup if McGuinness can’t pick students
The Donegal manager holds little affection for the Ulster season opener and his record in the competition shows five defeats from six, with the only win last January against UUJ in his first game in charge.
On the other hand, in league and championship, his side lost just twice last year in 14 games, an insignificant reversal against Laois in Portlaoise when Donegal had already sealed a place in the NFL Division 2 final and a two-point defeat to Dublin in the All-Ireland semi-final in August.
McGuinness believes the training ban in November and December added to the fact he has to compete in the Dr McKenna Cup without students in January makes preparation for the NFL almost impossible. He also doesn’t believe he will have a full compliment at midweek training until May, with Michael Murphy, Martin McElhinney and Michael Boyle in DCU, Eoin Waide and Leo McLoone at UUJ and Mark McHugh a student at IT Sligo.
“I think we are going to have to seriously consider whether or not we enter the Dr McKenna Cup next year if we don’t have the college players available to us,” McGuinness said, “I think this is something the GAA is going to have to look into and who the college players are available to.
“It is certainly not working and I would urge the GAA to look at the whole subsidiary competition and if there is no change we will have to seriously consider not playing in the Dr McKenna next year.”
These sentiments back up McGuinness’s thoughts after Donegal’s first game of the new year, which they lost 0-11 to 0-9 to UUJ in Letterkenny earlier this month.
“We’re at a slight disadvantage because of that and heading to Newry for a first league game without the students having played a competitive game for us is a difficult situation,” he said. “We’re a young squad and a year down the track and we’re still trying to develop them and develop cohesion in what you want to do. It’s not easy going into a game against Down and then we have Laois the week afterwards. We’d prefer to have them.”
McGuinness is still unhappy with the fall-out this week to his very public spat over the services of McElhinney with Niall Moyne. The DCU manager accused McGuinness of bullying the midfielder into playing a challenge game against Monaghan on the same day he was due to play for his college in the O’Byrne Cup semi-final against Meath. Ironically, McElhinney played for neither team after he was injured in the Donegal warm-up before the challenge against Monaghan in Clones.
McGuinness refuted the claims of Moyna and stated he asked McElhinney to travel to Monaghan as he had not had a chance to see the player in the flesh two weeks before Donegal’s NFL Division 1 opener against Down in Newry. He added that the Meath v DCU fixture was originally scheduled for Sunday and McElhinney was supposed to be available for his county on Saturday.
“Seemingly Meath requested the game be brought forward to Saturday night and DCU agreed,” McGuinness said. “When Martin told me he had a game on Saturday evening, I said to him we have our first game in the league in two weeks and that I had all the players from the other college back, to get a look at them. I said to him, ‘how can we expect to play you if we haven’t seen you play?’
“ Over the last 18 months I have got the best advice for Martin [who had been injured] and also have had a strength and conditioning coach working with him one-to-one once week.
“After investing so much time and expertise do people think that I would abuse such a player? To be honest it is absolutely ridiculous to think or suggest I would and I’m very annoyed that someone would make that claim.”
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