JIM MCGUINNESS BELIEVES his Donegal players may have been guilty of ‘projecting into the future’ and considering the celebration party instead of concentrating on beating Kerry.
The Donegal manager was generally at a loss to explain his team’s poor performance at Croke Park having come into the All-Ireland final as favourites.
Pushed for a reason, he said they may have been thinking too much about heading back to their City West Hotel team base and joining jubilant supporters.
“It’s a big occasion, maybe that’s one reason for it, it’s too early for me to say,” said McGuinness. “I have to look at it, look at what we did in the lead-in to the game.
Maybe we were thinking of nine o’clock and being in City West with the cup but the game is played at 3.30. It’s unusual because we nearly always deliver a high octane performance and we didn’t get that today. That’s the disappointing thing.
“Everything was good, we had a healthy squad. I don’t know. Maybe we were projecting into the future, I don’t know. That’s a genuine answer. I don’t know.”
McGuinness was unable to shed much more light on his own position as manager following four seasons in charge.
“Today isn’t a day to decide if you’re staying or not,” he said. “I’ve never done that. We’ll reflect and then we’ll decide the best move after that.”
McGuinness jumped to the defence of his goalkeeper, Paul Durcan, whose poor kick out led to Kieran Donaghy sniping a crucial 52nd minute goal. In the end, it could be considered the game defining error as Kerry won by three points.
“People have spoken about the goal we gave away, Paul’s goal, but we lost the game over 70 minutes based on our own performance level,” said McGuinness.
So you could say those goals had an impact, which they did, but if we were fully at ourselves, intensive and sharp and aggressive on the counter-attack, and if we played the way we practiced, seeing the man in idle space with the dink ball, the runner, we could have been very competitive throughout the game. But that didn’t happen. And that’s the most disappointing thing.
The 2012 All-Ireland winning manager said that failing to play to their potential was ultimately the team’s biggest regret. He lamented their inability to get through the normal ‘bread and butter’ aspects of the game.
“We wanted to deliver a performance that was worthy of the occasion, based on the work we’ve done, the effort that the boys put in the whole year,” he said.
“The disappointing thing is that we didn’t get the performance. We looked tired, a wee bit lethargic and we didn’t click into our normal rhythm.”
