Bringing Donegal to bloom
An unqualified, sold-out success, he knocked it on the head after a year when it became apparent just how much of a toll the two days of talking had on him.
Jim McGuinness is just as verbose but if there is any fatigue on his part, he does a good job of disguising it.
His 40 minutes providing approximately 6,000 transcribed words with the daily and local press in Ballybofey last Tuesday week finished up just before 11pm.
Cradling a cup of tea throughout, he looked ready for more but after two dozen questions or so, the media men were nourished by his offerings.
Having already spoken to Sunday newspapers for a similar amount of time as well as some radio stations, other broadcasters waited their turn to talk to him afterwards.
By the time he got home to Cresslough, it would have been past 1am.
A husband and father of three young children, the demands on his time as Donegal manager, the way he wants to be Donegal manager, are extreme.
On the drive to Dublin for a payments meeting involving inter-county managers late last year, he got thinking about how much he puts into the role.
“It’s more than 40 hours a week. And that doesn’t matter if you are in an All-Ireland final or with a Division 4 team, it’s the same hours, I would imagine.
“You have to be interacting with the players, the support team. Donegal is a big county, it takes us an hour to get to training, you are there an hour before training.
“We normally train for two hours, contrary to the press reports, not six. You have an hour after training and an hour home, so that’s six hours and that’s four nights a week.
“And me and Rory (Gallagher) would be on the phone at least an hour every day, then you’ve got your one to ones with players, then you are going watching games and watching club games. It could be anything.”
Try telling him it’s not worth it, though.
“Football is my life I wouldn’t change a minute of it and I have a great support system at home that allows me to do that.
“I hate saying 40 hours because it sounds like a job type thing, it’s not. It’s a passion. I went for the job three times for good reason, I believed I could do something with the players and I believed the players were there. That’s what’s driving me.”
He was approached by other counties — who saw in McGuinness what his own county board officials took an age to recognise — but turned them all down.
He comforted himself with the U21 position, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise as preparation for the next step.
As much as Division 2 and Ulster success was instantaneous in his first season in charge last year, there were hurdles to leap.
“When I took over the seniors, it was tough going. I met a lot of the lads one to one and they were like ‘I know I’m not playing well, I know the team is not playing well’. They were beating themselves up because they had been on the back of a lot of major disappointments and a lot of major hammerings in big games, which is very demoralising. “So to try and get them to realise they are good enough to win an Ulster Championship. Not an All-Ireland, because I don’t believe we could be in the position we are now only we won Ulster for the last two years.
“I don’t believe a team can win an All-Ireland without winning a provincial title. So my focus was on winning an Ulster title and when we won it, it was like ‘Jesus that’s unbelievable, we’ve done that’ but I don’t think they were thinking we were the best team in Ulster maybe, after they had won it.
“I think it was only after this year when they won it again (that) they started thinking ‘Jeez, maybe we’re not too bad’ and that gave us a bit of confidence going into the All-Ireland series.”
But what of these late goals and goal opportunities they have been coughing up in Championship games this year? There was Martin Penrose’s rasper saved by Paul Durcan in an Ulster semi-final followed by Kieran Donaghy and Colm O’Neill beating the goalkeeper in the last two games.
McGuinness isn’t worried. For one, he puts down the late concession against Kerry to the crowd getting into the minds of the team. “The players got carried away. That was the bottom line, every time the ball was passed, they were cheering and then all of a sudden they were hearing the noise so it makes sense to keep the ball off the opposition every time you get a cheer for it.”
As for O’Neill’s goal for Cork, he said Donegal had it coming to them.
“I am not really concerned about it. I’d prefer if they were not happening but I probably felt we deserved that goal to happen to us against Cork. I don’t believe you can play out three minutes at the end of a game by retaining possession at that level.
“Every day is a school day, and I have said that along, we are by no means the finished article. It is something that should not happen again if we get into that situation, so that is a positive.
“It didn’t cost us the match but if it was a two-point game, it would be a very difficult thing to live with.”
The message McGuinness transmits is convincingly genuine because he proffers a bank of evidence each time.
When he talks of Mayo as being “almost unplayable” in the first half against Dublin, you can see his point.
“For me, in an apprehensive kind of way, in the first half when I was watching it, I was thinking, ‘these boys are almost unplayable’. There was a period in the game where it didn’t matter if it was Donegal or Dublin or Kerry, they were absolutely unplayable.
“The way they were moving the ball, early and direct and the accuracy of their shooting was very impressive so I was kind of glad to see there was a drop-off for a 20-minute period because if that was over the 70 minute, I think it would have been one of the greatest overall performances ever seen in Croke Park.”
Instead, it’s Donegal who are on everyone’s lips, having beaten three recent All-Ireland champions on their way to tomorrow week’s final.
As McGuinness fine-tunes his preparations with his panel in Kildare’s Carton House this weekend, he has gone some way to assuring his players won’t be distracted by the hype engulfing the county.
But he, Jim McGuinness MSc in Sports Psychology, is adamant their minds will be in the right place regardless of their location.
“The bottom line for me is what’s important to get us over the line, coach that, get them to a level and put your faith in that they can deliver it.
“It doesn’t matter how many press nights there are, how many flags are up, how much hype is in the county — that is the only thing driving me. My job is to deliver that and the boys’ job is to deliver that on the field of play. I can assure you that nothing outside of that is getting in.”
