MIDDLE THIRD:LAST FRIDAY night, before the madness descended on Dublin, I headed up to Trim, Co Meath. There was a function on up there to celebrate the great Meath team of the 1980s, the jubilee team that was going to be introduced to the crowd on Sunday in Croke Park before the final.
Around 700 people turned out to greet them, to shake their hands and pat their backs and just generally be around them. There was so much respect and adulation and genuine love for these guys that it got me thinking about what winning an All-Ireland really means.
In Donegal this week, the players will be going through the tumble dryer. From Monday morning when they kept up the tradition of winning teams going to the Boar’s Head on Capel Street until they finally get home is a long week. Their bodies will be sore all week from the game itself and their minds will be frazzled with all the demands on their time.
The celebrating and the late nights and early mornings will take their toll as well. It won’t be until this weekend they’ll be able to find a bit of peace and quiet at home but even then it’s only temporary. Soon enough, it will be back to club championship and dinner dances and the team holiday and before you know it, January is here and it’s time to go again.
But the thing about it is, these players have no idea right now what heroes they are for life. They would have no concept of what 25 years could possibly feel like. I was looking at the likes of Liam Harnan and Mick Lyons and Joe Cassells last Friday and smiling at the idea of them walking out in front of 80,000 people on Sunday and getting huge cheers.
These Meath men who weren’t always as popular when they were playing, who people went blue in the face giving out about. And now everybody loves them. That’s what winning an All-Ireland does for you. Jim McGuinness knew that when he put 14 men behind the ball against Dublin last year, he knew that when he kicked Kevin Cassidy off the panel over the winter, he knew that when he refused to do his press conference on Sunday until the reporter was removed from the room.
Years from now, when these players gather in a room or walk out on the pitch ahead of an All-Ireland final, all anybody will remember is how Donegal dominated the 2012 championship.
That’s what they did, from start to finish. McGuinness deserves huge, huge credit for the job he has done with Donegal. Leaving aside for a minute the coaching work he has done with the players, his ability to come up with a fresh and targeted game plan for every new opponent has been a really impressive feature of their success. If people think he’s just going out there each day with the one system and hoping it will work just as well every time, they’re not watching closely enough.
James Horan has made huge progress with this Mayo team, but he was out-thought from the start in Sunday. Because McGuinness changes tack so often both from game to game and within games themselves, he keeps opposition managers guessing.
Maybe Horan thought that because Michael Murphy had started the last few games right in close to goal he might drop a bit deeper for the final, which is why he chose a very mobile player like Kevin Keane to pick him up. It’s hard to see what other reason there was for it because surely the one thing Mayo knew they couldn’t afford was to have Murphy one-on-one 14 yards from goal inside the first three minutes.
Mayo battled well for the rest of the game even after going seven down before they got a score themselves but battling was the least we expected of them.
And one of the things that McGuinness and Donegal have done is make it so that battling is never going to be enough.
You have to come with a tactical plan that is going to affect what Donegal do and face them down with something they haven’t seen before.
I’ve said it before here – your first job in a final is to attack your opponents at their strongest point. Target their best players and reduce their impact on the game from the start. People can get carried away with all the talk of Donegal’s system – impressive and all as it is, the reality is that their best players are still Murphy, Colm McFadden, Karl Lacey and Neil Gallagher.
Mayo needed to stop them influencing the opening stages of the game, but instead Alan Dillon let Lacey get away from him and didn’t chase him back hard enough, meaning Lacey only had to break one tackle to get the time and space to pick Murphy out inside.
On top of that, Mayo had nobody helping Keane out. They had no plan other than leaving their youngest defender to mind the house against Donegal’s most lethal forward. Ger Cafferkey was picked at full back on The Sunday Game’s team of the year on Sunday night, yet Mayo didn’t see fit to put him there for the biggest game of the year.
It was a fatal decision and it ruined Mayo’s best chance. We knew they needed to get ahead early and that they had to somehow get Donegal into the position of having to chase the game. Instead, once you strip away all the razzmatazz and the emotion of the day, it turned out to be a fairly routine win in the end. No matter how hard Mayo battled back, I never thought Donegal were in danger of being caught.
McGuinness has changed these players’ lives now. Let’s be totally honest about it, these were guys who were average players a few years ago. Rory Kavanagh, Neil Gallagher, even McFadden – these were never players you were worried about having to play against. But now they’re a squad of players who are getting the absolute maximum out of themselves.
McFadden has gone from somebody who was not a go-to guy, someone who might get a handy goal in a defeat but wouldn’t affect the outcome of game to a real leader who has had a superb year. I would make him footballer of the year now.
Together, they have laid down the challenge to the rest of the country now.
All the other contenders will meet up at some point over the coming months and will have to ask themselves very hard questions. Are you prepared to put as much into this as Donegal have over the past two years?
Are there managers out there who are skilled enough to think their way around what McGuinness will bring to each game? They’re going nowhere, you can be sure of it.
At the end of another championship, there are big challenges on the horizon for the GAA as well. The cynical fouling, the time-wasting, the standing in front of the free-taker is a feature of every team in every game now.
I wouldn’t single out Donegal for it – Kerry do just as much of it, everybody does. There’s no team in the country who won’t gladly swallow a referee moving the ball up 10 yards for a free if it gives them time to get their defensive formation in order. Because the stakes are so high and the reward is so huge, teams are pushing every little grey area in the rules as far as they can go.
Donegal’s level of detail is incredible. They plan everything down to the last thought, including their tactic on Sunday of having four men stand in front of the man lining up a free and having Michael Murphy break from the line and run away just as he’s about to kick it.
The idea is to catch the free-taker’s eye and put him off. It might only work one out of four times but in a tight game, that’s enough.
As I say, I have no issue with Donegal doing that. There’s nothing in the rules to stop them and they’re far from the only ones who do. But if a referee was to go in and move the ball in front of the posts, they wouldn’t do it again as quick.
It’s in the referee’s interest to clamp down on cynical play. Maurice Deegan should have said to hell with whether this is technically against the rules or not. Go in, move the ball up and that would have been the end of it.
But like a lot of referees in a lot of games over the past few years, Maurice wasn’t having an impressive afternoon. Another season down the road and the inconsistency of our referees is still the weakest part of our game. You don’t think Murphy was running away from that free at that precise second by accident, do you?
Of course he wasn’t.
This stuff is planned out and teased out by teams and managers whose whole life is dedicated to winning an All-Ireland and who see the referee as just another variable they must find a way to use to their advantage.
It’s very obvious we’re not putting the same amount of time, effort and resources into referees’ performances as teams are putting into their own.
And equally, it’s very obvious that the GAA don’t see it as a problem. If they did, they would be playing around with different ideas to eradicate it.
Why not bring in professional referees from other sports to coach ours? Why not try something fresh like more than one referee on the pitch? Or why not have a TV ref chatting in his ear, telling him what to look out for, helping him out?
But no, none of these things will happen because as far as the authorities are concerned, there’s nothing to worry about.
I think they’re wrong.
All the same, it wouldn’t have mattered if you had the best referees in the world getting every last decision spot-on all the way through the championship this year – Donegal would still have won the All Ireland.
Donegal have been the standard-bearers all the way through the year. They came up with something novel for every game, they confused the opposition and tied them in knots.
And they were just the better team in every game they played. They played some brilliant football against Cork and against Down and even in patches in the final when it was needed from them.
They were the best team in the country by a distance and they have the jump on everybody who is going to try and catch them now.
The worry for everybody else is that they’re not going away either. They will keep evolving. They won’t come back next year setting up the same way as they did this year.
It will be hard for them to follow it up obviously. Defending the title always is. The tent is coming down and the circus is over for another year but all across the country there are players and managers making plans for the winter.
They’ll all come gunning for Donegal next year, all out to take the scalp of the champions and out to get hold of a bit of that glory for themselves.
That’s the beauty of it.
That’s why you put so much of yourself into it.
No matter what happens in the lives of those Donegal footballers now, they will walk around as All-Ireland champions.
It’s up to everyone else to match them.
