ALLIANZ FOOTBALL LEAGUE, DIVISION TWO FINAL: Donegal 2-11 Laois 0-16:TUG AND pull all the way in the curtain-raiser. Donegal led from start to finish in this Division Two final but the shackles of a grinding afternoon stopped them putting Laois away and kept the result a mystery right up until the final attack.
In the end, they flopped over the line and Michael Murphy got to wave the cup in the air. “I’ll keep this short and sweet,” he began his speech, mindful perhaps of the work we’d all had to put in during the 70 minutes before.
Nobody was pretending afterwards we’d seen a classic or anything approaching it. “It was two teams playing a very similar style and cancelling each other out in the first half,” said Laois manager Justin McNulty. “It opened up a good bit in the second half.”
Donegal manager Jim McGuinness pointed to the fact Donegal had been overrun in midfield during their recent league clash as just cause for stitching another body into that area yesterday. Tactical stuff, Jim? “It was. The last time we played them, we lost out in the physical stakes. So we went with three midfielders this time.”
And the rest. If Opta did Gaelic football stats, it’s a decent bet they’d have found just about every player outside the goalkeepers getting on the ball between the 45-metre lines at one stage or other. The teams ground each other to a stalemate as a result and it took the sending off of Donegal’s Adrian Hanlon early in the second half to loosen the game up.
Along the way, Donegal did their best to squander an eight-point lead and Laois played the best football of the afternoon. But as soon as they got within sniffing distance, Donegal bopped them on the nose again and bounced clear.
“You have to give Donegal great credit,” McNulty conceded. “They defended very effectively and got numbers back behind the ball. I don’t think we had too many goal chances. If we had managed a goal, it would have been a different story. The goals they got probably came more from errors on our part than great play by them. That was the difference in the end.”
Donegal could have had a couple of goals on the board within the first five minutes. Colm McFadden – who with Michael Murphy authored most of the classiest contributions to the game – flicked at a speculative ball just outside the small square and drew a save from Laois goalkeeper Eoin Culliton inside 50 seconds. And wing forward Dermot Molloy clattered the base of Culliton’s left-hand post four minutes later. We settled in for a right old jamboree.
We didn’t get it. The two teams fell back relentlessly behind the ball and both looked slow and ponderous in attack as a result.
It was appropriate then the first clear water between the teams came through the awarding of a soft penalty to Donegal – Darren Strong landing the lightest of hands on the back of Murphy seven yards out. It was Murphy’s momentum that took him to the ground rather than any great force from the defender. His penalty was emphatic all the same and Donegal were never caught.
They reached the break 1-5 to 0-5 ahead but raced into an eight-point lead soon after it when McFadden finished off a Murphy lay-off. A couple of points from Murphy himself put them 2-7 to 0-5 ahead with half an hour to go. And that should have been that.
But Hanlon’s sending-off changed things. Laois ate into the Donegal lead by finding space and tipping over chances – McNulty found seven points off the bench in the shape of Donie Kingston (four) and Paul Cahillane (three). They scored seven unanswered points in 20 minutes to leave a point in it with 10 to go.
But like a racehorse idling in front, it seemed Donegal only needed a bit of a scare to rouse them. McFadden, Kevin Cassidy and Rory Kavanagh chipped in to see them home. The older brigade did it for a manager they all played alongside in his pre-tracksuit days. On a day where class was thin enough on the ground, experience just about saw them home.
LAOIS:E Culleton; D Booth, K Meaney, M Timmons; D Strong (0-1), S Julian, P OLeary; P Clancy, B Quigley; C Begley (0-1), J O'Loughlin (0-3), N Donoher (0-1); R Munnelly (0-2), B Sheehan, MJ Tierney (0-1, free). Subs:C Healy for Booth (30 mins), P Cahillane (0-3) for Clancy (half-time), D Kingston (0-4, 0-1 free) for Tierney (43 mins), K Lillis for Sheehan (66 mins).
DONEGAL:P Durkan; M Boyle, K Rafferty, K Lacey; A Thompson, F McFlynn, K Cassidy (0-1); R Kavanagh (0-1), M McElhinney; A Hanlon, M McHugh (0-1), D Molloy; R Bradley (0-1), M Murphy (1-3, 1-0 pen, 0-1 free, 0-1 45), C McFadden (1-3, 0-1 free). Subs:N Gallagher for Rafferty (43 mins); D McLaughlin for Molloy (54 mins); D Walsh (0-1) for McElhinney (58 mins).
Referee:M Duffy (Sligo).
