Donegal ready to quickly consign Dublin defeat to history

Not a lot to see, not a lot to talk through. Which, in these oh-so serious days, suits the Dublin management down to the ground. A routine query as to whether there was anything wrong with Diarmuid Connolly, named in the programme and by the official Dublin Twitter account an hour before the game but nowhere to be seen, was met with a no-elaboration, "Nope."

And as for the game itself?

"I'm just happy from the Dublin perspective to get that performance," said Jim Gavin. "Defensively, we were solid. Good structure. And offensively, good spread of scores throughout the team. So just satisfied with the result and happy to get the performance.

“We created a lot of opportunities two weeks ago but we just didn’t take them. Our execution was a bit more pointed this weekend. So to that end, goal-scoring opportunities, we probably created a few more of them. That gives us something to work on on the training field.”

Casual approach

As for Donegal,

Rory Gallagher

described the game as harmless and declared the last 20 minutes a non-event. Nobody was inclined to disagree. Ryan McHugh likewise reflected Donegal’s fairly casual approach to the day.

“The league is great. . . but championship is what we thrive on,” said McHugh. “We’re a very good championship team. We’re going to have to knuckle down now and go back to the drawing board. We had a great start to the league but a very poor finish.

“We put a big, big emphasis on every game we play and we would have come up here to win today, there’s no point lying about that. We probably didn’t put as much emphasis on it as we would a championship match.

“We have eight weeks now – we don’t know who we’re playing but we have eight weeks to prepare for championship . . the Dubs beat us and they were a far superior team.”