Donegal have problems to solve but don't write them off yet

Irish Daily Mirror

5 days ago

The scoreboard never lies. But sometimes it fails to tell the whole truth and nothing else but.
And this was the situation after 56 minutes of Sunday's All-Ireland.
On the giant screen above Hill 16, the bare details were outlined in big, bold print: Kerry 0-22, Donegal 0-18.
There was no question over who had been the better team. The scoreboard doesn't lie, after all.
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But from time to time it does leave out details.
And this was one. Across the previous 15 minutes, Donegal had outscored Kerry by eight points to three. Better again, they were just after thieving Shane Ryan's kick-out, the play transferred towards Paddy McBrearty, so often their hero, introduced here as a potential saviour.
Except there was a problem.
McBrearty is so long in the tooth that his debut came way back in 2011, during Jim McGuinness' first spell.
Time, as has been proven repeatedly, always wins against an athlete. It affects the body, erodes pace, stops a footballer reproducing the things their younger self managed to effortlessly do.
And that was the dilemma McBrearty was up against. As the ball edged towards the touchline, McBrearty had a choice. Bend low but risk allowing the ball creep over the sideline or kick it along the ground towards a colleague.
He took the second option and chose wrong, losing possession and with it all the momentum Donegal had been carefully building over the previous 15 minutes.
From the turnover, Sean O'Shea eventually scored a two-pointer. Donegal, meanwhile, scored just once more in the remaining 14 minutes, losing the endgame 1-4 to 0-1.
It may not have seemed such a big deal at the time but in hindsight this was a seismic moment.
And it led to the inevitable question after such a convincing defeat whether McBrearty and a few other Donegal players had taken too much physical pounding over the years.
After all, Michael Murphy is about to turn 36. McBrearty, for his part, is only 31 but has just completed his 15th season as an inter-county player. Between this pair, and Ryan McHugh, there are 219 Championship appearances on their CVs.
And it showed, McHugh forced off with an injury, Murphy pushing his body to extraordinary lengths to last the 70 minutes, McBrearty struggling in the 15 minutes he got on the park.
What if this is it for all three players? What if they all go together over the winter? Or what if they stay but aren't able to reproduce the magic in 2026?
Those are the questions that McGuinness will be thinking about on his long trip home today.
From history's scrapbook, he'll know that sometimes a defeat becomes a stepping stone - Offaly in 1981, Cork in 1987/88 and The Rebels again in 2007/09.
But unless you are Dublin or Kerry, winners of 70 All-Irelands between them, there are no guarantees or 'rite of passage' as McGuinness alluded to in advance of Sunday's final.
For every Offaly story from 1982, there are tales of woe: Roscommon in '80, Galway in '83, and Tyrone in '86, Mayo countless times, Kildare in '98, Cork in '99, Down in 2010. Each county lost a final.
On no occasion did it lead to something better which is something that often happens outside the Big Two.
Teams emerge. Teams lose big games. Teams then disappear.
Will this be the case for Donegal?
Perhaps not because the evidence suggests Sunday was a blip rather than the start of a worrying trend.
Following Sunday's 10-point defeat, it has been suggested that Donegal have a problem scoring goals. Yet only Kerry and Galway raised more green flags in this year's Championship.
Then there is the accusation they don't have a marquee forward.
And yet between them, Murphy, Conor O'Donnell and Oisin Langan scored nine points from play yesterday, Murphy finishing the season as the Championship's second highest scorer; O'Donnell and Langan as the summer's third and fourth top scorers from play.
What if the younger two push on from here? What if Murphy hangs on? What if their messianic manager stays on?
While he didn't have his best day on Sunday - failing to figure out that Paudie Clifford needed to be closed down - McGuinness has previously shown his capacity to recover from setbacks, the 2013 defeat to Mayo being way worse than Sunday's loss to Kerry.
The following year they bounced back, defeated Dublin, made it an All-Ireland.
This season too is an upgrade on last year - a fourth All-Ireland final coming on the back of a semi-final appearance in 2024.
Continuing their upward trajectory will take nerve, not necessarily a change of manager but certainly change within the manager.
Alex Ferguson constantly evolved, and frequently replaced his assistants. Bill Belichick was the same, likewise Brian Cody and Joe Schmidt.
What McGuinness now needs is a fresh voice rather than a dissenting one, a person who can replicate the role Rory Gallagher provided in 2011 and 2012.
Remember only one team in the country were better than them in 2025 and even if that was by a considerable margin, the reality remains that for Donegal to reach the top, evolution rather than revolution will get them there.
Don't write them off just yet.