Donegal’s Neil McGee says team’s recovery all about focus

They don’t get any easier. Having overcome Bernard Brogan and company in the last days of August, Neil McGee has spent the last three weeks studying another lethal front-line wearing the most iconic football jersey of them all.

In the beginning of the year Kerry were prematurely written up as the James O'Donoghue show. The Legions man has been sensational, but the Geaneys have been the puppet masters of the Kerry attack over the summer, Stephen O'Brien flashed over a point which signalled menace before injury took him from the Mayo semi-final, and, of course, the big man from Tralee, Kieran Donaghy, has come storming back into the reckoning.

In addition, Eamon Fitzmaurice was able to call upon Jonathan Lyne and Barry John Keane to deliver the killer points which felled Mayo in that semi-final tussle.

Even with Colm Cooper in rehab, Kerry’s attack is a dangerous thing. So there has been plenty for Donegal’s resident full back to think about on the drives to and from Gweedore over the past fortnight.

“Aye, they were impressive all year, and I suppose Star [Donaghy] has come on now and he gives them that extra dimension,” the big Gweedore man said when he finally got to sit down with a mug of tea after Donegal’s meet-and-greet in MacCumhaill Park. “Where they were depending on low balls in, you can throw any kind of ball in now. We have to be sharp all over the field.”

The big debate from Kerry’s perspective concerns Donaghy. Does Eamonn Fitzmaurice start him or hold him as a reserve ace? McGee is as much in the dark as anyone else.

“We can only prepare how we can prepare. We can’t factor in what they are going to do. We can just prepare our own team; whatever happens during the game we have to adapt and be ready for every scenario. We will get away now and the boys will get assigned to who they will keep tabs on and whatnot. It gives us a while to prepare for it, and a while to study for it.”

Kerry’s strengths

When the teams met in the 2012 quarter-final it fell to Eamon, the elder of the McGee brothers, to shadow Donaghy. If that pattern persists it may well fall to McGee to pick up O’Donoghue, whose duel against Keith Higgins was one of the highlights of the GAA summer. But McGee is keen to emphasise Kerry’s strengths across all divisions.

“Kerry are going to have exceptional long-range kickers too, with the likes of David Moran, Declan O’Sullivan . . . James O’Donoghue can go out there to kick long-range scores, Donnchadh Walsh. They are all capable of striking the ball over from 50 yards so it is something we have to work on.”

Even now McGee looks back at some of the points which Dublin kicked against Donegal in the semi-final and can't see what his defensive unit could have done to stop them.

“There’s not many Diarmuid Connollys or Paul Flynns! I see Diarmuid Connolly, two of the points he got he must have went past five or six men, he has both feet and there’s not much you can do about that.”

But any idea that the Donegal squad sat back with a cold brew to admire their performance against the Dubs is wrong. When they reviewed it they took the good and bad out of it.

Top-class team

“I suppose looking at it from the outside you might have thought it was a great performance, but once we sat down to analyse it now there would be parts of the game we would not be happy with. Conceding 17 points is a lot for this team over the years, with a couple of exceptions. But the Dubs are a top-class team, no doubt about it, and the scores they have been racking up all year, they will definitely be back again.”

The fact that Donegal are "back again" has surprised many observers. Talking in the aftermath of the semi-final win, it was McGee who recalled the afternoon when Michael Murphy screeched the car to a halt on the way to an International Rules meeting and hightailed back to Donegal to call an emergency meeting. The dramatic image ensured the story travelled and McGee grins when the episode is raised again.

“That’s all that pretty much happened. Michael wanted to get things sorted out and he managed that. It was just phone calls and we managed to call a meeting then on the Sunday morning. Everyone was at that meeting and we said: ‘Boys, what are we going to do here?’ Everyone was in agreement then that whatever we had to do to keep Jim in place we had to do it. And thankfully he stayed on and we have not looked back since.”

Their recovery was stealthy: they played well in winning promotion from Division Two without lighting the sky and a flat performance in Croke Park against Monaghan in the ceremonial final gave people a bum steer and prompted the assumption they were out of juice. Even in reclaiming the Ulster championship they gave little away. In beating Armagh in a nervy quarter-final they drew as much criticism as praise.

“Armagh . . . People were saying we only beat Armagh by a point. But I guarantee you that that Armagh team will come strong now. They have set a good platform for themselves and now that Kieran McGeeney is in charge they won’t be as far away as they were.”

Same intent

A year can change everything. Donegal’s season has proven that. The win against Dublin has earned them the right to play Kerry in Sunday’s All-Ireland final but for McGee the origins of their campaign can be traced back to the early sessions when it was clear to him that everyone was firing with the same intent.

He took Gweedore team-mate Odhran MacNiallais, one of the finds of the year, under his wing, gently encouraging him into accompanying him to gym sessions by arriving at his door. “Now, he’d be there before me.”

“Like a lot of teams we are together a long time,” McGee says. “And since Jim came in he has really bonded us together and we look forward to every training session. There are no days when you jump in the car and say, ‘Ah, no, I couldn’t be bothered going along here.’ You just love going to training, where everybody gets on. That’s from Rory Kavanagh to Darach O’Connor. Everyone is the same and everyone is treated the same. That’s important too.”