It was nearly 11 months since Jim McGuinness had been basking in the attention generated by his feat in bringing Donegal to a second All-Ireland. But yesterday's glum confrontation with the loss of that title must have made it all seem a lifetime away.

Champions fall, and frequently fall hard, but for someone whose persuasive rhetoric and scientific qualifications had become so associated with triumph, McGuiness can’t have found the rationale behind defeat easy to articulate.

"Where do you want to start? It's a good question, something that we'll have to work out over the next couple of weeks, to be honest with you.

'Wind out of our sails'
"The second goal obviously took the wind out of our sails. But the short version is we met a very hungry team today that were coming into this team with a mission of trying to win the All-Ireland. We had that last year in our play and everything that we did and Mayo have it now.

“We haven’t been ourselves all year. I don’t want to make excuses because it’s Mayo’s day and they’re fully deserving of their victory but we haven’t got traction all year.

“We had an awful lot of niggles and key players out and we haven’t been able to build momentum. But I don’t want to use that as excuses. You have to acknowledge the opposition and say they were on the money today and fully deserve victory.”

Having completed a momentous, three-year period in charge, he was asked about what the future holds.

“Our system is exactly the same every single year. It was the same in 2010 when we were with the under-21s. And that is the reason why we won the All Ireland in 2012. We’ll go back and we’ll identify all the things that we’re talking about here to day – injuries, hunger for the game, what would we have done better ourselves, what could we have got right in terms of the whole season and of the game today. And once we’ve done all that, we’ll know a lot more about the situation.

"That would normally take two to three weeks. On the back of 2011 we knew we had to go more offensive.

Attacking side
"That's why we didn't get over the line in 2011 and we put a huge emphasis on the attacking side of the game in 2012 to get us over the line. And it was that analysis that brought us over the line last year. That whole process has to happen again now.

“To me, it only makes sense at the end of a cycle to look at where you went right and where you went wrong and see what you would have changed.”