‘People twist your words’ – Jim McGuinness frustrated by injury rule

The Donegal boss was frustrated by one aspect of the new rules but welcomes most.

Donegal manager Jim McGuinness. Pic: Lorcan Doherty, Inpho

Donegal boss Jim McGuinness has hit out at the current injury rules after his side were momentarily down to 14 players for the play that led to Derry’s first-half goal.

Caolan McGonagle went down for treatment and had to leave the pitch before Dan Higgins found the net. It comes after a new rule, introduced last year, that states players who are not seriously injured but require treatment must leave the pitch and can only return during a break in play.

“It's very frustrating and the same thing happened us last year,” said McGuinness after their 10-point win. A similar incident occurred in the 2024 Ulster SFC opener with Shaun Patton having to leave the pitch.

“Games are defined by moments and we were in a situation where we were an unfair advantage. For what? What did we do?

“A fella gets a pain in his calf and all of a sudden, we're a goal down. That could have killed us. That could have lost us the game.

“No matter how I feel now, I'll tell you what, I'll be 10 times more annoyed tomorrow morning if that was the reason why we lost the game. I'm not a lawmaker. We're just coaches.

“We do think about the game, but if I told you my own opinion then everybody would have a headline tomorrow because that's the way it was. I'm not against the rules.

McGuinness continued: “I actually really like the rules but if you're watching the media and the noise around the media and the way people twist your words in the media, they try to make out that you don't like the rules or you're railing against this.

“You guys ask us our opinions and we give an honest assessment of that. People then twist that, I think heavily twisted that over the last month or two because I spoke with Jim Gavin on the phone a couple of times and I acknowledge the work that they've done and I think most of the rules are absolutely brilliant.

“I had a couple of comments about the two-pointer which I still don't agree with and the whole thing kind of blows up. But listen, that's the world we live in. You can't control that, nor do I want to. We're just going to focus on Monaghan and get on with that in the next couple of weeks.” 

Meanwhile, Paddy Tally was left frustrated by his side’s poor conversion. They finished with 43% conversion to Donegal’s 75%. Shane McGuigan hit an early penalty straight at Patton.

“We missed the penalty at a crucial time,” Tally said.

“When you come to places like Donegal in their own patch, you have to get ahead of them. I don't mean that for definite, but if you had got the penalty, it would give you a wee bit of a breather. It also lifted Donegal.

“It just lifted the stadium. You could see early in the game it was just a game where we were controlling it. But you have to make the most of those chances. In fairness, I thought we started the second half really well too. We brought it back to two.

“At that stage of the game, that's the time when you have to take control of it. And then Donegal went, I think, maybe ten points unanswered, something like that, where we just couldn't get hands on the ball. It just wasn't good enough.”