There was no doubting the seriousness with which Donegal were taking their away All-Ireland group match in Cork’s Páirc Uí Rinn.
As soon as the win over Tyrone in the opening fixture was finished – by consensus their best display to date in a stellar year – manager Jim McGuinness whisked them off to the training centre in Convoy to reset the team’s focus for the following weekend.
With good reason, as it turned out.
There were two straws in the wind in relation to the match against Cork. One was that in the league meeting on the first weekend of the season, although Donegal had put down a marker with an 11-point win, they had been out-goaled by the visitors to Ballybofey, 2-6 to 1-20.
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On Saturday afternoon, McGuinness raised this in his post-match interview, commenting on how the home side caught his team on the break for all three goals.
“We played Cork earlier in the year and Cork scored two goals from transitional moments. Matty Taylor [who scored Cork’s first goal on Saturday] coming from the half-back line – he’s probably one of the best half-backs in the country at doing that.
“We were very well tuned to what they were going to bring to the table but being tuned to it and dealing with it are two different things. They are very strong and very powerful and very direct and they made those transitional moments count.”
There was also the scheduling. After burning the barn in Celtic Park back in April, Donegal struggled to replicate that form in the Ulster semi-final against Tyrone a week later. Tyrone had also been in action – in their case, seven as opposed to eight days previously, getting taken to extra time by Cavan – but they gave a better account of themselves.
Maybe there is something in the preparation of Donegal or the toll taken by their style of play that requires a longer break between matches. Either way, they arrived in Cork on Friday evening after an arduous journey – the longest championship road trip ever undertaken by the county.
Speaking about the two-week break before playing Clare in the last match in the group, McGuinness said the extra time was welcome.
“It is. With the one-week turnaround it’s a long journey and it’s not easy travelling down here and playing Cork – I’ve had that experience as a player as well. But that’s not an excuse. Cork were very good today. They were very well organised and they knew what they wanted to do.
“In terms of qualification, topping the group is not within our hands anymore. If Cork win the next day, they top the group, which is an advantage because you get a two-week break.”
And that’s the vital consideration. Group winners go straight through to the All-Ireland quarter-finals whereas second and third seeds play each other in preliminary quarter-finals with the survivors having to face the group winners just a week later.
Last year, only one team made it to the semi-finals having played that schedule and coincidentally Monaghan overcame the only group winners not to have won their provincial title, Armagh.
Final day mishaps meant that both Mayo and Galway, who had opened their respective groups with excellent wins over Kerry, in Killarney, and Tyrone, lost top spot and had to play each other in the preliminary quarter-final, which exacerbated Galway’s injury problems and gave winners Mayo three matches on the spin.
By the third week they were running on empty, no way to be facing Dublin in Croke Park. They would have been outsiders anyway, as Tyrone and Cork were in their quarter-finals against Kerry and Derry, respectively but the odds lengthened with the disparity in preparation.
Given that Donegal have already experienced difficulties on the one-week turnaround, such a schedule is presumably the last thing McGuinness wants going into an All-Ireland quarter-final.
Win your group, keep winning and you will have the ideal two-week interval between matches.
There is also already an imbalance in the system, which affected Donegal as Ulster champions and meant they had to play a week after their first All-Ireland group fixture. This is simply because Ulster and Leinster are bigger provinces and their championships take longer to complete.
Connacht and Munster champions, Galway and Kerry – and beaten finalists Mayo and Clare – began their group campaign a week before their Ulster and Leinster counterparts, which gave them and four others, Derry, Monaghan, Cork and Mayo an early start and perfect scheduling with a fortnight between matches.
Those on the Leinster and Ulster side of the fixture schedules, started a week later and then had to play their second seven days later. For Dublin, away to Cavan, the imposition was tolerable but for Donegal, playing a team rested for a week longer than they were, it wasn’t.
The venue was Páirc Uí Rinn, the county’s secondary ground, and was seen as a slight advantage to Cork, as the county footballers had an established relationship with the venue, embracing it in the 2022 dispute with the Munster Council over where that year’s championship match with Kerry was to be played.
A hot day compounded all those problems for Donegal with Cork’s pace and athleticism and helter-skelter style especially draining.
Saturday was a terrific step forward for Cork. They hadn’t beaten provincial champions since the All-Ireland-winning year of 2010 when they defeated Roscommon in that year’s All-Ireland quarter-finals.
They hadn’t got the better of Ulster champions since beating Tyrone in the 2009 semi-final.
The imperative now is again to take something off Tyrone in two weeks’ time and top the table with all of the attendant advantages.
“I suppose time will tell,” said manager John Cleary afterwards. “Where we’re standing now, if we lose to Tyrone, we’ll probably finish third. We were playing at home here on a beautiful day in front of a big Cork crowd and a big Donegal crowd.
“We’ve had a few close shaves against top teams in the past and we didn’t get over the line. We missed a few scores as well but we got three goals today, which was the big difference. All year we haven’t been getting them and we’ve been ruing the goal chances we’ve missed.
“We probably did again at times today but getting three got us over the line.”
All to play for.
