THERE WAS SOMETHING impressive about Donegal in the second half on Sunday, but with Monaghan in the wings on Saturday-week, the optimism sort of tapers away quite quickly.
Rory Gallagher said in his press conference before the game against Fermanagh how Donegal have been consistently written off over the last five years.
“Some people have wanted Donegal as a force to be over with a long time ago – 2011, 2012, 2013 – right up to last year people have been writing our obituary,” he said.
He’s right, too, but the funny thing is you look at a game like Sunday and you can understand why people might be apprehensive about what lies ahead.
The question mark is still over Donegal.
They answered some of them against Fermanagh, but with Neil McGee missing and Michael Murphy not 100 per cent fit, there are still lingering doubts.
One part of it was the discipline, but the other part of it was that at 8-3 up we just sat in.
You can’t sit that deep; certainly not as deep as Donegal did for a lot of Sunday’s game.
Against Down, Monaghan were crap in the first half and no-one is mentioning that so maybe we’re being too hard on our guys.
We were 8-3 up and maybe they were sitting trying to find themselves. For me, the tactic must always be break and hit. Had Patrick McBrearty scored that goal, it was lights out.
Fermanagh got the first point of the second half and you thought, them having the tails up, that they were going to come for us. But Donegal dominated and controlled the game from there.
Had Sean Quigley scored the penalty, I don’t think it would have made an iota of a difference. From being a point up or being a couple down, I think Donegal would still have had enough to be in control of the second half the way they were.
There was too much quality in that Donegal team. The way it is, when two teams play the same way it boils down to who has the best players. The next day now, it’s a different proposition because Monaghan are a better group of players.
We’re without the best full-back in the country in Neil McGee. Monaghan, with Conor McManus and the two Hughes, have a serious threat.
Darren Hughes is one of the best ball carriers I’ve ever seen. I don’t just mean now, but at any stage.
The hope for Donegal now is that someone else steps up. We’ve heard stories that Kieran Gillespie is going well in training, Eamonn Doherty played a lot in the League, but Karl Lacey is the one we’d want back there, if he’s fit.
[adrotate group=”46″]He hasn’t played that corner back role in a while, but he’d suit it.
Donegal are going to have to sit more than Monaghan are. If we have enough men back, we can frustrate because we have enough good tacklers. It’s breaking out then where we’ll need the two McHughs, Frank McGlynn, Leo McLoone and Martin O’Reilly to really drive us on.
By and large, McBrearty is the only man Donegal will keep inside so we need to isolate him and get the ball to him.
The two debutants were the biggest plus in Ballybofey.
Eoin McHugh injected a good bit of pace into the team. He gave us a break up the pitch to engage other people.
[adrotate group=”53″]I think it was his dad, James, who said about players maybe getting away for that for the first year, but the way the scrutiny has gone now I’d say he’ll be a marked man now for Monaghan.
If this was ten years ago, Mark Anthony McGinley would have been the man of the match. Now, kick outs are so important it probably meant his rating suffered a little.
They didn’t have much of a bearing on Sunday, but against a better team or in a tighter game one of those kickouts could sway the game.
But he made two brilliant saves and he looked comfortable under the high ball. He can command his area and he’s definitely assured.
A lot of people have mentioned the two kickouts he put over the sideline, but it’s harsh on the lad. If you had a forward coming in for his first Championship game and he pulled two shots wide, he’d probably get away with it.
[adrotate group=”38″]The whole thing seems to reverberate around goalkeepers and kickouts now, they just get analysed to death.
That said, Monaghan will be looking and saying: ‘We can shake him, we can unnerve him’ and you can be sure there’ll be a bit of bad manners coming in from Monaghan, who’ll want to test him.
As much as Donegal can, they need to take that pressure away from him.
If there is any pressure on, my suggestion would be to go long. When it goes right we have as much right to win it as the other team.
It is funny the way it changes: Before, if you didn’t win it, it was your fault that you didn’t win it. Now, they blame the fact that the goalkeeper couldn’t take a short kick-out.
Fermanagh manager Pete McGrath was on about gamesmanship on Sunday evening and it’s funny that only seems to get picked up on by the losing team. Quigley tried to get involved in it a bit too and it didn’t work out for him.
It can go a bit hit-or-miss with Quigley.
That stuff is in the game, but I don’t agree with the suggestion: ‘It’s part and parcel of the game’. I think a referee needs to be strong and throw out a yellow card when he sees it.
On the incident itself, I’m surprised to see that Donegal are considering an appeal against the red card.
For me it was a stonewall red card. That can’t happen. Neil is far too important and Donegal’s season could hinge on that moment.
It’s a disaster for Donegal to be without him.
Then you have the situation where Murphy just doesn’t look at himself. The chap has played too much football, I think. He was playing McKenna Cup and in the early League games. We really don’t need him at that time of the year. We need him in tip-top form now in the summer.
If we had Michael sitting building a hunger, a desire to get involved during those early weeks of the year, it’d be some concoction to be taking into the Championship. He looks laboured and it’s a worry that we don’t have him firing on all cylinders.
The challenge now for Donegal is to regroup, but the time is short.
Everything is pointing at a Monaghan win and Donegal are being written off – but they should buzz off that and be able to summons something in response to that.
It will take one of Donegal’s best performances in years to get over this one.
