If the particular relevance of these pre-season games is for each individual manger to decree, you won't hear a word of objection out of Rory Gallagher's mouth. The new Donegal manager has been in the slightly odd position these past few months of taking over the job without quite being able to take over the team.

The winter ban meant that the beaten All-Ireland finalists could only train together for the first time last weekend. But even if Gallagher had been of a mind to colour outside the lines on that rule and introduce their noses to the grindstone earlier, it would have been a self-defeating pursuit. They were spent.

“It’s been a bit of a long wait to get going really because we basically left them alone until last week,” says Gallagher.

“We could have got them all together before then but I made the decision to leave the main 20 players off until the last few days of December. They needed a good rest, they needed to recharge the batteries.

“The All-Ireland defeat was very deflating for them. You could see it in the club championship. I would say that really none of the county players played particularly well in the club championship. Very few of them anyway. They were very deflated and very much felt that they left an All-Ireland behind them. That takes a bit of shaking off. But you have to get on with it. Football goes on.”

The fold

And Donegal will go on with it. The widely-predicted wave of retirements hasn’t come to pass. That drip-drip of All-Ireland winners who disappeared back into society through the winter didn’t have a single Donegal name among them.

Gallagher reckons he has everyone back in the fold – the McGees, Neil Gallagher, Colm McFadden, Karl Lacey and the rest. Only Rory Kavanagh has been left to his own devices. Gallagher expects to see him back near the end of the month.

“I wasn’t overly worried about losing any of them to be honest. None of them are the age where they shouldn’t be playing. I think Rory Kavanagh is the oldest and he’s 32 and one of the fittest members of the squad. It’s just that those guys have been playing a long time and maybe people perceive that they’re older than they are. But they were all in when they were 19, 20.

“The way we did it, we identified the 19, 20 guys who are definitely going to be in the squad and the majority of them needed a longer period of recuperation anyway. We’ve brought in 12 or 13 fresh faces – a lot of them I would have known through club football and working with the under-21s last year.

“There’s an element of freshness to it and it’s very much into the unknown for some of them. So you get them in and you see if they can make the step up.”

Among the new faces expected to see game-time in their Dr McKenna Cup opener against Derry tomorrow are Eoin McHugh – another of the Kilcar dynasty, son of James McHugh – and 33-year-old Monaghan man Eamon Ward who has been playing club football in Donegal for a number of years and will make his inter-county debut.

Experienced player

s Mark McHugh is back in the fold after taking last year out, although his brother Ryan and clubmate Patrick McBrearty will play for their colleges for the next month instead of their county. The league starts in four weeks against the same opposition they face tomorrow. Gallagher’s ducks aren’t near being in a row yet; they will be closer come the time.

“This is very much pre-season. It’s almost impossible to put your experienced players in. There’s a high risk of injury if you do that because they haven’t been training. We’re very much experimental for now in these early games. We have no choice but to be using the younger players who haven’t been taking such a long break, who’ve been doing running programmes of their own or training with colleges. Particularly for this first game, we’ve almost no choice.

“That’s the way we’re approaching it. We’re not expecting a player to come from nowhere to all of a sudden be a star in the team. But what we’re hoping for is that over time we can improve these players. The league is really exciting to be honest. Yeah, it’s not as important as the championship and we wouldn’t pretend that it is but it’s a really strong Division One and has been over the last number of years.

“It’s the place you want to be and our goal will be to survive it. You can’t just go along in second gear and hope you can get through it. It will be a matter of getting our newer players and experienced players together and having our best 23, 24 players for the championship.”