Nobody outside Derry enjoyed the Ulster final. And good luck to them for it. I think in all the analysis giving out about the game – and it was a terrible game to watch – it’s only right that Derry get a hall pass. You’ll go to any lengths to win your first title and I wouldn’t be turning up my nose at them for that.
There’s no doubt that on a technical level, Derry were to blame for what an eyesore the game was. They set the terms and conditions – not just on Sunday but all the way through the Ulster Championship. They did what they did to Tyrone and then they did it again to Monaghan. There was zero chance of them changing things up for a game when they had a chance to win their first Ulster title since 1998. Less than zero.
It’s Donegal that I would be more disgusted with. When you’re the more experienced team, the onus is on you to take responsibility. Some of these Donegal players have been playing in Ulster finals for the guts of a decade now. They know what has to be done to win them. Yes, there’s always going to be a bit of standing across the battlefield staring each other down. But eventually, the team that wins is generally the one that goes for it when it matters.
Donegal weren’t brave enough. That’s the long and short of it. Experience told them not to panic and that’s fine – they did well to get back in the game after Derry’s good first half. But once they were level, they played as if that was the job done. There’s a fine line between not panicking and not going for it. If you go 12 minutes at the end of an Ulster final without taking a single shot, you don’t deserve to win it.
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That probably says a lot about why Donegal haven’t done a whole pile in the championship over the past few years. They surely have the players. On any given day, a team with Michael Murphy, Patrick McBrearty, Shaun Patton, Brendan McCole and Ryan McHugh in it has to be up there. But the last time they were in an All-Ireland semi-final was 2014. They keep coming up short.
Why? Because they don’t go for it when games are there to be won. Their game plan always seems to revolve around containment, not giving the opposition anything to get carried away with. But at some point, you have to move away from not losing and focus on winning. That has to be part of the game plan too.
I’m sure lots of the Donegal players wanted to kick the winning score but because of the way they play and the attitude they carry into games, they weren’t able to manufacture the chance. They tried to see out the game with a two-point lead. Then they tried to see it out with a one-point lead. Then they decided they were happy enough to take their chance with extra-time. That’s a terrible failing if you’re a serious team.
We’re into the point of the season now where only serious teams need apply. There are no second chances now. Every game will end with a casualty. Now is not the time to be evolving and discovering who you are. You either have what it takes or you don’t.
That’s what has generally set Mayo apart from the tier of teams who don’t make All-Ireland finals. Mayo are never afraid of failure. They have had plenty of flaws down the years and plenty of reasons why they’ve come up short. But the one thing you can never accuse Mayo teams of is being too cagey.
If Lee Keegan was in Clones last Sunday, could you really see him accepting his team going the last 12 minutes without taking a shot? No chance. Same goes for Cillian O’Connor and Aidan O’Shea and the younger guys too. The likes of Ryan O’Donoghue and Oisín Mullin wouldn’t just want Mayo to shoot, they’d want to be the ones who did it. There would have been an urgency about them that was lacking in Donegal.
That’s why, for all their failings and even with reports of a long injury list, I would still take Mayo to see off Monaghan on Saturday in Castlebar. On a very basic level, they have a body of work behind them that is leaps and bounds ahead of anything Monaghan have achieved. Also, they don’t tend to lose to Ulster teams.
The one obvious exception is last year’s All-Ireland final against Tyrone. But go back over the years before that and you won’t find many games where they got taken down by a northern team. They’ve beaten Tyrone and Donegal several times along the way, in All-Ireland quarter-finals, semi-finals, Super Eights games. I remember Derry taking them to extra-time one year but they still got out the gap.
Flip it around and who have Monaghan beaten outside of Ulster? In 2018, the year they got to an All-Ireland semi-final, their big wins in the Super Eights were against Kildare in Croke Park and Galway in Salthill. But even that Galway win was an odd one, since Galway were already qualified for the semi-final and played like they didn’t want to risk getting sweat in their eyes.
But otherwise, if you go through the last decade in Monaghan football, their list of victims outside Ulster isn’t overly impressive. They regularly pull off big wins in the league but when it comes to championship, they haven’t been a threat to the likes of Dublin, Kerry, Mayo. They’ve been able to beat Tyrone in Ulster the odd time but never in Croke Park. They had Kerry on the ropes in Clones that time in 2018 but couldn’t see it out.
In all honesty, there’s probably an element of Ulster caginess there too with them. They met the Dubs in a couple of All-Ireland quarter-finals but never gave you an impression that they were capable of anything more than keeping it tight and trying to contain them. That might work in a league game in March when the ground is soft and the bigger teams have their eyes on bigger games down the road. But you won’t contain your way to the latter stages of the All-Ireland.
That’s why I wouldn’t really row in with all the fellas talking about the death of football and all that after the Ulster final. If you don’t know by now that what it takes to win Ulster is different to what it takes to win and All-Ireland – what it takes even to compete at the latter stages – then what have you been watching for the past decade? If you know it won’t win an All-Ireland, then what are you so worried about?
I have no problem with Derry playing like that to win Ulster. None in the slightest. Look at what it meant to those people on Sunday. That’s a day they will remember for the rest of their lives. When you ask them about it in 20 years, they won’t tell you a single thing about how the game was played. They’ll tell you about the emotions they felt and the crack they had for days after it.
But can Derry win an All-Ireland playing like that? Not a hope! The bigger teams know how to play against them when the day comes. You have to play with width, pace and patience. You have to press right up on their kick-out and pen them in. You have to make Brendan Rodgers do some defending and not make a hero of him up at your end of the pitch. None of this is really that complicated at the highest level.
To be fair to Monaghan, the way they set up this year has been different to other years. With Donie Buckley and Liam Sheedy in the backroom staff, they were probably thinking more of what it would take to win in the latter stages than in Ulster. For the first time in God knows how long, they played Derry with a three-man full-forward line. It was the wrong way to go about it on the day because it played into Derry’s hands. Longer term, it’s possibly not a bad way to go at all.
It is a statement of intent. It says they’re moving beyond just trying to keep it tight and hold the other team to a manageable score. If they go again on Saturday with Conor McManus, Jack McCarron and Gary Mohan all playing from the start, then at least they’re going to Castlebar to try and win. It wouldn’t be a huge shock if they pulled it off.
In the end though, I think Mayo are just more versed in what it takes to win this kind of encounter. They have a big-game mentality. In tight situations, when you need something to happen, they have a record of making it happen. They don’t play conservatively. They don’t wait for the other team to flag.
Even in last year’s All-Ireland final, it was only their execution that let them down. People forget that they created three more scoring chances than Tyrone in that game. And none of them were potshots – they didn’t try for hero scores from positions you’re not supposed to shoot from. Time and time again, their game plan got them into positions where they should have scored. Their problem was they had a chronic day of shooting.
Think about Ryan O’Donoghue trying to curl his penalty into the top corner instead of burying it low and hard. Think about Tommy Conroy blazing wide with Aidan O’Shea open inside. Or O’Shea himself missing that easy chance into the hill, or Conor Loftus not setting his feet properly for any of the good chances he had that day. Those were all bad, bad misses.
One of the reasons Mayo are always there or thereabouts is that they’re never afraid to go after it. They want to take on those shots, no matter how many times they miss. I think it’s worth a couple of points to them most days against the cagier Ulster teams and I think it will be enough to see them through on Saturday.
