Declan Bonner is asked a couple of times about the perception that the chasing pack are closing in on six-in-a-row All-Ireland football champions Dublin – and where indeed Donegal might rank among them.
He gently rolls his eyes and then politely suggests he has more important things to worry about right now then Dublin.
Beginning on Sunday, when the Donegal manager brings his team down to Newry to play Down, with that also beginning another Ulster football championship campaign that has them seeking an 10th final in the last 11 years.
That run of final appearances included last year, when they were fancied to beat Cavan in the final, then put it up to Dublin in the All-Ireland semi-final. However, in the knock-out pandemic winter, Cavan decided otherwise.
With no backdoor to rely on this summer either, Bonner's immediate focus is justified. He also indicates his captain Michael Murphy should be fit to play after sitting out recent weeks with a hamstring injury, knowing too only the full tilt of championship will test it.
“The only focus for a number of weeks now is to get that big performance on Sunday,” says Bonner.
“Look, you have to believe there are a number of good teams out there now, no doubt about it. But we’re not getting carried away talking about Dublin or Kerry or anyone else, when all I can see at the minute are the red and black of Down, when we go into Newry on Sunday. That’s the only focus in my head at the minute, and the focus of the group.
“Knock-out is not ideal this year, given the lead-up time has also been very tight, after a tough league campaign, maybe three or four weeks. With no luxury of the back-door. We have to be 100 per cent ready for Sunday, to get physically and mentally over that line, a one-point win would do us fine.”
Even with that impressive Ulster final record of late, Bonner remembers well the years when Donegal couldn’t get close, including during some of his own playing days.
“There’s no point looking back now, but at the time, yeah, you’d be training really, really hard for a championship, and back then you had three or four rounds of the national league prior to Christmas as well.
“But it made for a long summer, and sometimes you would wonder what it was all about. I remember 1987 and 1988, losing our two first-round matches on both occasions to Armagh, and that was a long, long summer. So bringing in the backdoor was huge. It’s a system that works, it’s not ideal not having that now, but it’s not an ideal world we’re living in now.
“These days the championship [structure] can always be looked at again, no doubt about it, but Ulster has always been competitive. For us in Donegal, getting to nine finals in the last 10 years has been huge, to be quite honest. We went many, many years without ever getting to an Ulster final, after a golden era in the early 1990s.
“And Ulster finals would have been few and far between a long, long time before that. We still have four teams in the province playing Division One football. It’s a very long route to go to make Croke Park at the end of August, and we’re only looking forward to Sunday.”
Four goals
Donegal did get to play Dublin in the Division One semi-final (losing 1-18 to 1-14), and there were plenty of other valuable lessons in the league, not least in conceding four goals to Monaghan (and still coming away with the draw).
“Any day you concede three or four goals you have to sit down and sort it out, that’s for sure. So it was definitely something we looked at, and I think since then we have steadied down as a defensive unit, even if we did concede another couple of goals.
“It’s one of those things on the training ground, you’re always looking at your attack and how you can improve that. But at same time it’s about getting that balance, so we’ve been working on both elements, and every other manager would be. From then we had to be sure wouldn’t be conceding four goals.”
“We played Armagh, the game before [Dublin]. We’d a lot of guys that day who did reasonably well against Dublin even if maybe it didn’t have the feel of a really competitive match. From our point of few, I thought it was a decent game of football.
“Dublin are Dublin, they just keep doing the things better over the 75, 80 minutes, whereas we maybe have spells of 20 minutes here and there. Dublin just have that relentless consistency in their levels, and that’s why they are the top team . . . But we used 30 players, ended up staying in Division One, and from that point it was a successful campaign.”
On Murphy’s current fitness, the three-time All Star in his 11th year as captain, he said: “Yeah, Michael has been back over the last week, we’ve two more training sessions to get through, but at the moment he is good to go. The majority of guys are back on the pitch [with the notable exception of Odhrán MacNiallais].”
