Darragh Ó Sé: Donegal suddenly flavour of the month again

Above in Donegal, they must be rolling their eyes at the rest of the country at this stage. All of a sudden, everybody is in love with them. You don’t hear a word said about blanket defences or negative tactics or any of that stuff anymore.

The only thing the rest of the country wants is for somebody to give Dublin a game and they’re at the top of the queue after another Ulster title. So they’re getting love from all corners now.

That’s some turnaround, you have to admit. We only have to go back three or four years and to listen to some people, they were the worst thing that ever happened to Gaelic football. The style of play brought in by Jim McGuinness was nothing less than a cancer on the game. They were destroying football, they were destroying a fine footballer like Michael Murphy, they were a stain on the nation altogether.

I remember writing a column back then praising them and getting absolutely pilloried for it. That’ll tell you how unpopular they were – people were so annoyed at Donegal, they were annoyed at me!

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You couldn’t praise the likes of Murphy or Karl Lacey or Colm McFadden back then without someone telling you that the death of the sport was happening in front of you and that you were only helping them on their way if you didn’t hammer them ever chance you got.

And now? Everybody is so desperate to find somebody to give the Dubs a game that Donegal are flavour of the month again. They beat Tyrone by setting up their team more or less the same way Jim used to – plenty of men behind the ball, breaking out with loads of runners when they got a turnover – and all you heard was what a tactical masterstroke it was.

Now that they’ve put Cavan away so handily in the Ulster final, they’re everyone’s second team. They’re the great white hope all of a sudden, the only ones who can save us from the five-in-a-row. It’s such an Irish thing. I wouldn’t blame them one bit up there if they were wary enough of all the praise that’s coming their way this week. We’re a fickle crowd – we’ll probably turn again soon enough.

Away from the pure blind hope, it’s not hard to see why they could be contenders. Go through the building blocks of what you need to win an All-Ireland and Donegal tick an awful lot of the boxes. Being able to do that guarantees nothing, obviously. But as the same time, you’re guaranteed to win nothing if you can’t tick those boxes.

First off, in Shaun Patton they have a goalkeeper who looks to be good at everything you need in the Stephen Cluxton era. Start with his kick-outs. They’re accurate, whether he’s going long or short. And when he goes long, he goes seriously long. Donegal have obviously done a pile of work on making space for him to kick into and they’re not afraid to let him kick a 50/50 ball to Murphy or Ciarán Thompson or Hugh McFadden and trust them to take the mark.

Second year

The other big advantage he has from a kick-out point of view is that he’s fairly new on the scene. Teams are trying to study him but they only have a small body of work to go on so far. I saw an interview with Kieran Hughes of Monaghan after they got beaten on the weekend and he was saying he thought other teams had started to work Rory Beggan out a little bit this season.

Short of pulling a knife out of your tracksuit bottoms, no referee is going to lift a finger against you

That’s bound to happen, especially if you’ve been around a while. But Beggan has been the Monaghan ’keeper for seven seasons now, whereas Patton is only in his second year. Nobody has had time to work him out yet and Donegal are taking full advantage.

Somewhere along the way, it will happen – maybe in the Super-8s, maybe in the first half of an All-Ireland semi-final. The big challenge for Donegal will be how he reacts.

Just from watching him, he strikes me as a fella with a strong enough attitude, all the same. There was a moment in the Cavan game about 10 minutes short of half-time when a shot from Oisín Kiernan dropped short in his square and it looked like Martin Reilly might get in to punch it to the net.

Patton didn’t blink. He came out, eye on the ball, arms pumping and made sure to both get his first on the ball and to bury Reilly in the same motion. Reilly went down in a heap and, cool as you like, Patton collected the ball and came out with it, sending Donegal on their way again.

It was a textbook example of how to deal with a dropping ball in your square. If I was in the Kerry set-up, I’d make Shane Ryan sit down and watch it 10 times before every training session and 10 times after. Just that one clip, over and over. That’s how it’s done.

Ryan’s kick-outs were much improved against Cork but this is the second game, along with the league final, where he’s got beaten to a high ball and given away a goal. He’s still learning his trade – he plays outfield for Rathmore – so presumably he’ll get there eventually. Watching how Patton handled the same situation will do him a world of good.

In that situation, your goalkeeper needs to realise the advantages he has and use them accordingly. He’s coming out facing the ball, he can see everything, he knows where everyone is. More importantly, if there’s a pile up, the referee is highly likely to either do nothing or give him a free out.

I hear lads saying the ’keeper should stay on his line in that case but I’d be the other way on it – come out and brain everything in front of you. Short of pulling a knife out of your tracksuit bottoms, no referee is going to lift a finger against you. When has anyone ever seen a penalty given for a foul by a goalkeeper under a dropping ball? I’ve been watching football a long time and I don’t remember it.

Serious physicality

So they have their goalkeeper. They have serious physicality as well, which is a basic need if they’re ever going to challenge Dublin. Obviously, they have fine players all over the pitch as well. Murphy and Ryan McHugh, Jamie Brennan and Patrick McBrearty. Quality footballers.

They are well drilled, tactically aware, patient and clever. You need all of that and more the further you go

Smart footballers too. I was very taken with Neil McGee the last day. He got an early yellow card and in his younger days, that would have been a red warning light. If you were playing against Donegal and Neil McGee was on a yellow card, it was an open door. Go in there and make yourself a nuisance, see how he likes it.

But there wasn’t a bother on him on Sunday. McGee played away without turning a hair on his head. The yellow card didn’t mean the thing to him. He never came close to getting a second one, he just played his game and took control of the full-back line. And when the game was won with 20 minutes to go, they subbed him off so he didn’t have to worry about it anymore. Job done.

That told me another thing about Donegal. They are very sure of what they’re doing. Big championship days can make lads get very excitable sometimes. You watch some teams and it’s like being at a school play. When everyone is supposed to be lining up and going in one direction, there’s always one or two kids who head off in the other direction and the whole crowd falls about laughing.

There is none of that with Donegal. Everyone knows where they’re going and what their job is. Look at the calibre of men they have on the line – Declan Bonner, Karl Lacey, Stephen Rochford. They are well drilled, tactically aware, patient and clever. You need all of that and more the further you go.

This all comes together to feed into their cutting edge where it matters most – in front of the posts. The thing that really struck me about them on Sunday was where they were taking their shots from. Go back and watch it and you’ll do very well to pick out a potshot by any Donegal player.

Basically, they're playing the game Dublin play

There’s no fella trying to make a name for himself from out on the sideline or to bend one over along the endline. If the shot isn’t on, they’re not forcing it. They’re coming back out, taking their time, waiting for a runner to make the space and keeping the ball alive until the right chance presents itself.

Basically, they’re playing the game Dublin play. The genius of Dublin is that the vast majority of their scores come from spots on the field where you or I would fancy our chances of scoring.

Clever movement

By the time one of their players is taking a shot, the opposition has been pulled and dragged all over the place by clever movement and huge athleticism, so much so that the shooter is nearly always somewhere in or close to the D. Even at 44, I’d swing a leg at a shot from that distance.

Paul Mannion scored a brilliant point for Dublin from out on the Cusack Stand sideline the other day but the reason it was memorable is because it’s so rare to see a Dublin player go for that kind of score any more.

In the days of Diarmuid Connolly and Paul Flynn and Bernard Brogan, they’d happily take on long-range points and if they scored two out of every three, it was a good day. Not anymore. That’s way too much margin for error in Dublin’s way of playing.

Donegal have followed that model. Murphy and McBrearty can score from anywhere but you can see that they have decided as a set-up that football these days doesn’t really have room for that sort of hero stuff.

And as they put up score after score against Cavan, all from in front of the posts or within 30 metres if they were on an angle, Donegal looked to have cracked it.

Whether they can repeat it – and keep on repeating it for the rest of the summer – is another story. But heading into the Super-8s, they have the key building blocks in place. Very few of the other contenders can say the same.