Last year's defensive system has been refined and Donegal pose a potent attacking threat too as they prepare to lock horns with Cork, writes SEAN MORAN

CORK WON the football All-Ireland two years ago. By consensus, they have been the best team in the country this year. They have no injury concerns. Tomorrow they contest a seventh semi-final in eight years, so why is everyone talking about their opponents, Donegal?

In the space of under two seasons the northern county has gone from a reputation for bewildering mood swings, talented ball players and free- spirited attitudes to regulation to an iron-willed collective with Spartan cohesion and discipline, a first provincial title in 19 years last season followed by a first-ever successful defence last month.

Most of all, though, Donegal have become famous – or notorious – for a back-built system that has exceeded the already tightening parameters of modern football tactics.

The appalled alarm triggered by their semi-final against Dublin a year ago felt like intimations of a football apocalypse.

The only mitigation came in the result, as Dublin managed to prise a way out and Donegal had to accept that you need an offensive game as well as a plan of containment given that six points won’t win many big matches.

This year, with a slightly more expansive game plan, Donegal are back having won another Ulster title and symbolically defeated the greatest football county of all in the quarter-final.

The displacement of happy-go- lucky Donegal by the rise of the machines is seen, accurately, as the masterwork of one of football’s most intriguing personalities, Jim McGuinness.

Declan Bonner was on the Donegal team that won the county’s first All-Ireland 20 years ago and he managed the seniors in the middle of the last decade. Success hasn’t been qualified by aesthetic concerns within the county boundary and ambitions have steadily climbed.

“Last year it was more about hope; now there’s a lot of expectation,” he says. “I think he’s moved it on a notch. In the beginning, Jim just had to get them more competitive and that was the reason for the defensive formation.

“They’re still well set up defensively, but at the same time they’re breaking out in greater numbers, particularly from the half backs and at greater pace – guys like Anthony Thompson, Karl Lacey and Frank McGlynn are getting forward to score. But they’re also still defending in numbers and Kieran Donaghy’s goal is the only one they’ve conceded in open play.”

Bonner summarises how the new management of McGuinness has revolutionised the county.

“He came with a background in sports psychology and he had a plan for the way he was going to set it up. The players bought into it and have trained very, very hard – to professional standards and that hasn’t always happened with Donegal players in the past. There were always stories getting out of players going on the lash, missing training or getting thrown out of the squad for x, y and z reasons.”

The biggest challenge to the regime came with Kevin Cassidy’s expulsion from the panel at the end of last year. The current All Star had co-operated with the writing of a book about the 2011 Ulster championship without clearing it with McGuinness.

Any suggestion that a rift had been forced in the landscape was refuted when firstly none of Cassidy’s colleagues attended the book launch – and reportedly in their explanatory text messages none of them hid behind the cover of a managerial diktat – and secondly when team captain Michael Murphy used a Sigerson Cup launch to say that the players were fully behind their manager.

A year ago, Derry All-Ireland winner, columnist and TV pundit Joe Brolly wrote about attending a Donegal training session, saying how impressed he had been by the intense severity of the work, which lasted a clear three hours.

Among the drills was one in which Colm McFadden, frequently the team’s lone forward, was set against three defenders and hand passed the ball 10 times with instructions to go for a point. He hardly got a single shot away, as he was swamped by the defenders but he had to react and rise to the tempo of the challenges. Michael Murphy did the same and got maybe one shot off. But when the covering defenders were reduced to two, McFadden began to score.

The cumulative impact has been to make McFadden increasingly comfortable with playing a solitary role.

McGuinness first made the county panel in the year of the All-Ireland, 1992, but he was a peripheral figure in the success before going on to feature strongly in county teams that never quite got there in the years that followed.

He was something of a legend in the Sigerson Cup, the GAA’s prestigious third-level colleges’ championship, playing on until his late 20s and winning three titles, two with IT Tralee and captaining UUJ in 2001.

His long hair and beard helped him cut a cavalier dash through his extensive student days but to contemporaries he was already exhibiting signs of a future coach.

“As a player he was very skilful, a stylist and very athletically gifted,” says Enda McNulty, the Armagh All-Ireland winner and now sports psychologist and performance consultant with Motiv8, who played with McGuinness at Jordanstown.

“He was captain in 2001 and a very natural, talented communicator. When you’re trying to motivate and inspire young players those skills are essential. The other thing was how much he thought about the game.

“The longest chat I had with him about football was coming home from the semi-final in Cork that year after playing UCC. I found him very innovative, comfortable thinking outside the box and wondering about football in the future and how it would evolve. He was interested in other sports and why football couldn’t be more like basketball where players move about positionally or like soccer and experiment with different formations.

“For instance he learned a lot from Kerry players while he was in Tralee. It was one of his big things – getting really into the details of the best players. He was very interested in Mike Frank Russell, who he said wouldn’t head immediately for goal, but always turned back before deciding and lost his marker. He was impressed by the evasion skills.

“He was older than most of the team, but not too many 28-year- olds had that level of interest or understanding.

“There’s no point in only highlighting positive influences. I’d be surprised if Jim didn’t reflect at times that he had underachieved in his playing career . . . I think he’d believe that even though he displayed skill and athleticism in his career he didn’t achieve his full potential, like a lot of the best coaches across sports.”

McGuinness’s credentials – his nomadic educational career equipped him as both a qualified fitness and conditioning coach and a sports psychologist – were overlooked when he applied for the Donegal position in 2008, but a stint with the under-21s brought an Ulster title and an All-Ireland final appearance that, but for Michael Murphy’s last-minute penalty hitting the woodwork, would have landed the county’s third such championship.

Many of the recognisable building blocks were in place, the defensive set-up and the pivotal role of Murphy up front and Mark McHugh as a sweeper. Already it was unsettling opponents. Dublin were apprehensive coming up to the final in 2010, according to selector Declan Darcy.

“When we knew we were playing Donegal in the final it was almost a freaky thing. All of a sudden you were worrying about a team and an approach you’d never been exposed to – it was definitely tricky. It’s been a very effective system for Donegal.

“You have to break it down: do you hold your shape as a unit or go man to man and take them on at their own game? Last year Dublin (seniors) held their positions and that’s a good idea if you’re leading because it forces them to come at you but if they’re leading it can be very difficult and Dublin nearly got caught.

“We felt we had to go after them from the start, get on top and force them onto us. Psychologically we wanted to take the game to them and not have them dictate their terms to us.

“Mark McHugh was hugely important to them as well as a link man and he’d developed and improved since. He’s highly intelligent, reads the game well and anticipates the play – doesn’t just sit back in the hole . . . .

“But for all the talk about the system it’s built around some fairly important players. I’ve been surprised at how some teams go after the system instead of the key players – Lacey, Murphy, McHugh, McFadden – and concentrate on them.”

McGuinness has been careful not to encourage any cult of personality to develop and interaction with the media is controlled but when he chooses, very engaging.

Tomorrow is likely to be the biggest test of his two years and with an All-Ireland final appearance on the line for the second year in succession, a higher level of expectation than 12 months ago attends the team. For the past two seasons he and his team have scattered challenges and benchmarks like skittles to a point where only a couple remain.

But they’ll be hard strikes.