Jim McGuinness: 'We were chasing our tails'

Irish Examiner

3 days ago

No ifs or buts or maybes from Jim McGuiness after Donegal's comprehensive All-Ireland final loss to Kerry.
Out-thought and outplayed on the day, the Ulster side never got to grips with the puzzle posed them by Jack O'Connor's side and ended up on the wrong end of a 10-point defeat that absolutely no-one thought likely beforehand.
The consensus was that this one was too hard to call. So… what happened?
'Ah, listen, it's a bit early for all of that, I suppose, and a wee bit raw. We didn't perform, Kerry did perform, that's the bottom line. They started very early in the game and they got a foothold in the game.
'I thought we responded quite well in the first-half on our attack, we were good, we were clinical, but I think they might have scored in their first six attacks, so we were struggling to deal with them in that period.'
McGuinness wasn't asked about David Clifford, his first answer just gravitated inexorably toward the Fossa man who existed on the margins of the game for long periods while being the absolute fulcrum in so many ways at the same time.
He finished with 0-9, six of his points coming from two-pointers.
'They went for a lot of two's and they hit a lot of them as well and that was big. David Clifford coming on to those balls on a loop… We'd done a lot of work on him and we did a lot of work in terms of managing him.
'I thought Brendan [McCole] did actually quite well on him for periods, but obviously it does take more than one person to try and close down David and he kicked some brilliant two's.'
The easy take is that Donegal were beaten by that early Kerry flurry. McGuinness didn't see it in those neat terms. Yes, it didn't help to fall eight points adrift inside the first quarter, but the thing about mistakes and problems is that they shouldn't be compounded.
Donegal compounded their issues at the big with more going forward.
'We made too many mistakes. We did things that we don't normally do, we made decisions that we don't normally do, and we just had too many turnovers. That's the bottom line. We had too many turnovers, and some of them were kind of clutch enough moments.
'So we were chasing our tails. There were a couple of moments before half time, a five-point game, then we lose possession, we give possession away, and then it ends up a seven-point game. That was a tough one to take.
'Had we been able to work that and got a score, we would have probably ended up getting four down at half-time. It might have been a very different dressing-room at that stage, very different dynamic in terms of going out for the second-half. But that was fairly significant.'