No going back for McGuinness or players

With a nod to the past and a bow to the future, Jim McGuinness explained just how his Donegal players will embrace the coming weeks as All-Ireland champions.

Beaming a smile, he said: “They had a name for being ‘party boys’ and we’re gonna let them be party boys now for a few days, let them enjoy it and then we’ll re-focus after that but nothing will change.

“We’ll look at where we’re at, what can we do to improve and we’ll put plans in place to try and move forward.”

Holding court in an ancillary breakfast room in the Burlington Hotel yesterday morning, he could laugh about that now redundant perception of his panel.

But it had irked him, he admits, to the extent that he addressed it in his very first meeting with his players on November 6, 2010.

There, in Rosapenna Golf Club in Downings, he showed them exactly how low an opinion other people had of them.

“I remember there was an article, called the State of the Nation, and I opened it up, it was a two-page spread and we were rated 19th in the country and I just held it up to them and said to the boys, ‘I want your opinion as to why you feel we’re 19th in the country?’

“That was a very poignant moment for the group I feel, a lot of honesty came out of that moment.

“We broke them into groups of six and seven on it, they spent 20 minutes on it and they came back in and a lot of home truths came back.

“They identified the fact that they weren’t fully honest with themselves, that they didn’t do the hard graft, they were cutting corners on gym work, they weren’t putting in the hard yards and it was a great moment, I felt.

“And it came from themselves as well, which is very important.”

That epiphany day in November continued with another meeting in the afternoon where they plotted a path to become All-Ireland champions.

McGuinness recalled: “After lunch, we had them for a few hours that day it was our very first time to get together, we had another session in relation to how do we get to number one?

“They sat down and talked about what it was going to take, how they were going to live their life, the training, their attitude towards training and all those things came into play. Now here we are two years later and we are number one.

“And they have done that, not the management. They have done that because if they didn’t move and change from where they were at and identify what they wanted to do with their own football career we wouldn’t have got from 19th to number one.

“For me, that is a fantastic journey to be part of and to see development with the players is very satisfying.”

McGuinness doesn’t anticipate Donegal can make as many advances performance-wise next year as they have done over the past two seasons.

“I wouldn’t expect the same evolution, to be honest, because we moved fairly significantly in the last season.

“I mentioned it last year after we’d got to the semi-final, we were still fairly inexperienced and there’s only so much you can get done in a season.

“I think we’ve added a right bit, maybe 40 or 45% to our game plan. So we’re probably up at 90 % or in and around that now so if you can get that other five or seven, eight per cent it would be a lot.

Dublin found out this year that winning an All-Ireland after a long period can take plenty out of the system but even at this early stage McGuinness feels his players won’t fall into the same trap.

“They’re very hungry, they’ve had a lot of setbacks down through the years and it’s only two seasons under their belt with a bit of success so I personally feel there’s a good hunger and desire there in them to achieve more in their careers.

“I’d look to the likes of Kilkenny and teams like that that are there year in, year out. The hunger’s there every year, the determination’s there every year and the desire to achieve is there every year and that’s the kind of benchmarks you’d be looking at from a young squad and moving forward.”

As much as he doesn’t believe it will be difficult to raise them for a title defence next year, McGuinness is realistic about what lies ahead of them on a higher perch.

“Kieran McGeeney has done phenomenal work in my belief but still hasn’t got the success for the efforts that the Kildare players have put in, so it’s very fluid... a lot of things have to happen.

“The hunger, the desire, the focus, the will to win, the commitment to come to the training field with the right attitude.

“We’re delighted to have this one, we’ll be going out to move forward but we’re very pragmatic and know everyone else will be trying to up the ante as well.

“We’re part of a group of eight to nines teams that want success at a national level and, even saying that, we feel we’re in a privileged position to be in that place.”