Former Donegal footballer Kevin Cassidy has pinpointed the battle between Meath full back Seán Rafferty and Donegal full forward Michael Murphy as being potentially pivotal to Sunday’s All-Ireland SFC semi-final.
“I’m really looking forward to the Rafferty and Murphy matchup, to be honest,” said Cassidy, speaking at an AIB event on Wednesday. “The young lad starting out his career, Michael with all his experience. Two good lads who love the real physical aspect of a game.
“I think Michael will probably try and drag him out of that position. If he can drag Rafferty out of full back, it may leave gaps for other players.”
In his first year of championship football, Rafferty has been one of Meath’s stars and was particularly impressive in their quarter-final win over Galway.
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“I watched Rafferty in a couple of games this year – he’s a young lad, his first year on the panel and he plays with no fear," said Cassidy. “I’m thinking about the turnover on Johnny Maher the last day. If that was any other defender, they wouldn’t want to jump in. He attacks every ball.”
Although Meath are underdogs for Sunday’s match at Croke Park, they have already beaten the odds this year with wins over Dublin, Kerry and Galway. Cassidy believes Donegal manager Jim McGuinness will not allow his players to fall into the trap of buying into their status as favourites.
“It’ll be on Jim’s radar. Everybody’s building us up, but I can guarantee the message he will be putting across is, ‘go back two years ago and everybody was knocking Donegal’. They (Meath) beat Cork, Dublin, Galway and Kerry; Jim is going to drive that message home that these lads are absolutely here on merit.”
There is history between Cassidy and McGuinness. The Donegal manager dropped the two-time All Star after the publication of a book in which Cassidy contributed information about Donegal’s championship preparations in 2011. His omission from the panel meant Cassidy missed out on the All-Ireland win in 2012.
Cassidy says this season is beginning to feel like 2012 all over again: “It does look like that at the minute. Jim, he takes a project and he breaks everything apart and builds it block by block. In 2011, that’s when he stripped it back and started to build.
“The game against Galway last year – if we had Michael Murphy, would we have got over the line? Jim obviously identified that. He’s brought Michael back in and I think they’re playing a better mixture this year.”
He believes his old boss was right to complain about the scheduling of their quarter-final against Monaghan just six days after beating Louth, although he also admits that it grew into a bigger story than it should have been.
“Obviously the six-day turnaround was a legitimate complaint and it was unfair. But I think by that stage we had complained that much that nobody was listening to us any more. So listen, I think Jim got his point across, but from a player point of view, it’s all about Sunday now.”
