Micheál Clifford

JIM MCGUINNESS MAY have picked up more than a Sigerson Cup medal from his student days spent in Kerry.

The hooter had barely hushed after his team’s round five win over Derry in Ballyshannon last month, when the Donegal manager busied himself reading from the book of kind words, as he lavished praise and preached hope for the vanquished.

‘Going into the championship, off the back of today, they’ll feel they can have a real cut of us in Ballybofey. So that’s a positive for them,’ he told the media post match.

How that missive of comfort would have been received in the Derry dressing room is another thing after they had just seen a match-winning seven-point lead morph into a three-point defeat inside 12 minutes, effectively confirming their relegation from Division 1.

Compounding matters, they had also just lost Brendan Rogers to an ankle injury so serious that he has not played since as the veteran joins Anton Tohill, Conor McCluskey and Gareth McKinless on the long-term injury list, ensuring that for McGuinness’ opposite number Paddy Tally, accentuating the positives was likely to be a bit more of a challenge.

Whether McGuinness was getting in early with the mind games or not might be open to debate, but what was not was where his mind was at.

It is all about championship, all about Ulster and, even more so, all about the All-Ireland.
In the second season of his second coming, the narrative that he is tracing the footsteps of first time round is seductive.

In fact, if anything he looks to be setting out from an even more advantageous starting point given that they were in many ways, the unofficial league winners.

Yes, Kerry got the cup but taking the perverse barometer of survival as being the optimum position, the fact that they had the luxury of becoming the first to drop anchor and field weakened selections for the final two rounds ensured that they won the far more coveted prize.

Donegal boss Jim McGuinness. Lorraine O’Sullivan / INPHO Lorraine O’Sullivan / INPHO / INPHO

That they still came within a Daire Ó Baoill missed penalty of becoming accidental finalists adds significantly to their feel good factor.

More than the four games that they won, that result – with roughly half of their championship team – hinted at the kind of squad depth required to win the Sam Maguire and the market has heeded it too.

They start out the weekend as the second favourites – just behind Kerry – which is quite the feat that little over two years ago the only place where the Donegal footballers were getting traction was on the comedy club circuit, after Paddy Carr was forced to step away after losing the dressing room just weeks prior to the start of the summer.

That they would find their feet again under McGuinness was a given, but that they would continue to thrive under new rules which sought to devalue structured play was less so.

In a way, though, there was a degree of lazy analysis in that. It has been McGuinness’s capacity to adapt that has always been key to his success; never more obvious than in how his team transitioned from being hard to beat in 2011, to being hard to stop 12 months later.

It also ignored the reality that few player groups were better positioned to exploit the new game.

In Shaun Patton, they possess arguably the longest boot on the kick-out tee, while they are blessed with an array of strong ball winners in the middle eight which will be enhanced when Jason McGee returns to full fitness to compliment the likes of Caolan McGongagle, Michael Langan, Ciaran Thompson and Ciaran Moore.

Despite being pigeon holed as a group that leaned heavy on defensive structure, they possess high end defenders, not least Brendan McCole who has been the most consistent full-back in the country over the past three seasons, while All-Star Peadar Mogan has reverse gears as well as forward ones.

Their defensive options have been swelled this year by the arrival of Finbarr Roarty and the continued development of the impressive Mark Curran.

Add in the play-making genius of Ryan McHugh and their breadth of distance kickers – they were at the top end of net benefactors from the two-point rule having registered 16 – O’Baoill claiming a half dozen – in the league, and it is not hard to see why they appear to have adjusted so seamlessly.

All good, then. Well, mostly.

There still remains the fact that for all the progress achieved last year, they simply were not good enough to win the All-Ireland.

That was primarily because of an attack that lacked a collective and cohesive threat; one which leaned far too heavily on All-Star Oisin Gallen.

The league would suggest that they still have work to do on that front, not least their lack of goal threat which saw them hit the net just twice in seven games.

It is plausible that one of the factors behind that was a focus on creating shooting opportunities outside the 40 metre-arc, rather than seeking to exploit the gaps inside it to create goal chances, although it was also a case that their execution when those chances presented themselves were not all that they could have been.

However, the biggest gift that the new game may have offered Donegal is to force them to become a more direct attacking force.

Their instinct to play through the lines caught up with them in last year’s All-Ireland semi-final against Galway, when despite being the dominant team for large swathes, they were physically spent as an attacking force in the final quarter.

In the second-half they managed just five scores from 14 attempts and critically just a solitary point from the 43rd minute.

The change gifted by the three-up/three backstructure should ensure a more varied attacking plan this summer, but for all of their perceived depth – 35 players, including 31 starters, saw game-time in the spring – the sense remains that much hangs on the shoulders of one man.

Michael Murphy signs autographs for Donegal fans. Laszlo Geczo / INPHO Laszlo Geczo / INPHO / INPHO

Knowing that they had to be better this season, McGuinness took the most obvious short-cut in achieving that by securing Michael Murphy’s return.

The hype that accompanied the comeback of the county’s greatest ever player was tempered by gentle talk of how his presence alone would have a huge impact on the dressing room, but all of that was blown out of the water when he arrived on the pitch in round three against Armagh and plucked a ball one-handed out of the Ballybofey sky.

Thing is, Derry did not lose that match in Ballyshannon last month by accident; Murphy simply took it away from them.

His introduction ignited a flagging team – one whose jaded demeanour up to that point reminded of the side that faded in the final quarter against Galway.

How much his 35-year-old body – and he was forced off in the penultimate round defeat to Tyrone – can take the demands that will be placed on him over the next four months will ultimately decide if history rhymes for McGuinness and Donegal.

For now, at least, it is humming.