Marty O'Reilly: Prospect of final with Dublin not an issue for Donegal
Donegal can make that fixture a reality if they beat Mayo on Sunday, while all-conquering Dublin, currently top of Division 1, only need to draw in Monaghan to confirm a final place.
Five-in-a-row chasing league champions Dublin have made a particular habit of signing off on the league in style and punishing teams in springtime deciders at Croke Park. They beat Kerry and Cork by 11 points in the last two finals and put 3-19 up on Derry in 2014, leaving all of those counties with a giant pre-Championship hangover.
A heavy beating in front of the eyes of the nation would be particularly troublesome for Donegal, as they’ve 13 U21 players who are still finding their feet at senior level.
“Any time you get to Croke Park to play Dublin, even if it is just for the experience that the younger lads gain from it, it’s worth it,” counters versatile wing-back O’Reilly.
“For them to come in and to get to play Dublin would be great and, to be fair, every day we go out and play a game of football against Dublin we’re trying to beat them. We had a tough game in Ballybofey a few weeks back, it was a draw in the end, so if we happen to get past Mayo on Sunday we’ll be looking forward to a league final no matter who it is against.”
Dublin, of course, aren’t guaranteed to make it to a fifth consecutive final themselves, as they’ll face in-form Monaghan in Clones.
However, it’s only last weekend that they hammered Roscommon to set a new unbeaten record for league and Championship games.
“Dublin are 35 games unbeaten now, they are the form team in the country,” said O’Reilly. “If you even look at their last game against Roscommon, they were quite dominant over them last weekend, whereas we just about got past Roscommon.
@They had a chance at the end and didn’t take it and we got a last-minute winner, so, if you look at it that way, there could be signs that Dublin could beat Donegal heavily, if we meet, but the players wouldn’t believe that. We’ll go out and we’ll certainly put in the best performance that we can, if we get to play them in the final.”
That Donegal are here within touching distance of a first final berth since they won the competition a decade ago is an impressive achievement in itself.
Christy Toye, Rory Kavanagh, and David Walsh, all members of their All-Ireland winning panel of 2012, retired in January, just months after Colm McFadden and Eamon McGee made the same decision.
Odhran MacNiallais, an ever-present throughout 2016, and Leo McLoone, another member of the 2012 group, also made themselves unavailable this year.
That required Donegal boss Rory Gallagher to put more faith in talented young players than he may have wished to at this early stage of their development.
Eoghan ‘Bán’ Gallagher, an All-Ireland minor finalist in 2014, started their first five league games and plenty of his former underage colleagues are involved, too.
Dublin-based school-teacher O’Reilly said: “It’s been brilliant to get them so involved. The likes of Ciaran Thompson has come in. He’s over 21, but he’s doing great. Cian Mulligan came on in the last two matches and got a point with his first touch against Tyrone. It’s great, really good for Donegal football.
“When we first met up last November, we knew that eight or nine senior enough players weren’t coming back. It didn’t come as a surprise then when a few of them announced maybe in January or February that they weren’t coming back and we had three months of training done at that stage.
“We still sat down and said that getting to a league final was our target. We have that chance now on Sunday, but obviously Mayo will have a lot to say about that too.”
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