In their climb to the summit Donegal traded on incredible fitness, an ingenious system modelled to their resources, the required amount of indoctrinated self-belief and a few special players. In full flow it was a stunning vision of power. Every night before training Jim McGuinness had the same message for his players: let’s be the team that trains hardest in Ireland tonight. They convinced themselves that this was good and, most of all, that this was sustainable.
When Monaghan smothered them in the 2013 Ulster final and Mayo barbecued them in Croke Park a few weeks later it was hard to see how that group of players would recover. The aura around the team that McGuinness had so skilfully cultivated had been holed. They looked spun out. Old, suddenly.
To get them back to the 2014 All-Ireland final was an extraordinary achievement by McGuinness mostly because Donegal rejected the pat diagnosis of their circumstances. They did it not by changing, like everyone ordered them to, but by being the same. It was the ultimate confidence trick.
How many times can you try that? How many times will it work? Once was a staggeringly good strike rate.
So, what has happened since then and where are they now? In defeat against Kerry in the 2014 All-Ireland final Donegal used 20 players, eight of whom were in their 30s. The feared rash of retirements never materialised; Rory Kavanagh stepped out for a year but has since annulled his retirement. Whether players left voluntarily or not, though, the persistent feeling was that Donegal couldn’t postpone change any longer. Being the same in how they played and who they played was no longer viable.
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On this issue McGuinness was given some latitude because Donegal’s consistently dull record at underage level provided him with limited material for change. The team that he guided to the 2010 Ulster under-21 title were their first winners at that grade in 15 years. McGuinness harvested everything he could from that group.
McGuinness’ successor, Rory Gallagher, is in a slightly different position now. Donegal have contested the last three Ulster under-21 finals in a row and would feel that they should have won two of them; in 2014 they contested the first All-Ireland minor final in their history and backed that up with two triumphs in the Ulster minor League. All of that gives them huge hope for this year’s under-21 campaign.
At the beginning of his first season Gallagher added a dozen players to the panel; at the beginning of this season he did the same thing. Gallagher’s design to re-energise the set-up led to a clearout of the 2014 backroom team; even the bus company was replaced.
But when last summer’s championship came around there were no radical changes to the starting 15. And when their season ended in Croke Park in August they looked weary again. The stark challenge facing Gallagher was how to recover Donegal’s terrifying power with a group of players that had been flogged for years.
The suggestion when Gallagher took over was that he would pay more attention to tailored training programmes for older players and not demand that everyone shared equally in the hardship, as McGuinness had done. Making that demand was easier when the McGuinness project was in its infancy and it was easier to rationalise when the players could see the dividend from their suffering.
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Gallagher had to deal with the aftermath of all that. In reaching the summit and in nearly reaching the summit again they put themselves in serious oxygen debt. Their ability to perform repeated sprints up and down the field was astonishing. Their fierceness in the tackle, their desire to force turnovers and counterattack at pace and in numbers overwhelmed many of their opponents. In the medium term, though, that was unsustainable; the age profile of their best 20 players wouldn’t allow it. That aside: could any team have sustained that level of physical expenditure? No.
In fairness to McGuinness he initiated some tweaks to the system in his last couple of years. The Mark McHugh role, for example, which was a key point of difference for Donegal in their All-Ireland winning year, no longer really exists; that phasing out process commenced under McGuinness.
Back then McHugh looked like a player who would be pivotal to Donegal’s future for many years; in the seasons since he has become more and more peripheral. He famously quit the panel after the 2014 League and has only recently returned from another short absence.
The consensus is that McHugh needs handling; Gallagher used to be his club manager and that may be an advantage in this regard. The bottom line, though, is that McHugh had a so-so campaign last year and is no longer as important to the team has his brother Ryan and, increasingly, his young cousin Eoin. Ryan is a better footballer; Eoin has greater acceleration; Mark is probably a squad player now.
To keep Donegal relevant as a Croke Park team in August, though, Gallagher needed to accelerate the rate of change. Mayo, Monaghan and Kerry have all worked them out in recent summers. They lost the capacity to overpower teams for whom September is a viable target.
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So far this year they look a little different: less formidable in defence but more explosive and productive in attack. Allianz League victories over Down and Cork wouldn’t be a litmus test of anything — even though the Down win was their first away from home in the League since before McGuinness took over. The Mayo game, though, was pleasingly intense and they trailed by three points well into the third quarter; to come back and win as they did was impressive.
More importantly, some young players are making an impact: Michael Carroll, Stephen McBrearty, Eoin Gallagher, Ciaran McGonagle and Ciaran Thompson are all players who would seem to have championship futures, if not this year then soon. Gallagher has acknowledged that the lack of depth in the panel and he has tried manfully to address it: nine different players have been tried at centre field in the last 12 months, for example; 25 different players have seen action in the League this year so far.
Come the summer there will still be 10 or 12 familiar names but the bench might be stocked with some marquee players and the starting 15 might have some new legs. Running power was how they got here in the first place; that’s what they need now.