After losing to Cavan in last year’s final, the real Donegal must stand up
Coach Stephen Rochford says the Ulster powerhouse’s failure to deliver on the big occasion has been frustrating
STEPHEN ROCHFORD is only half-joking when he suggests he’s still ‘in therapy’ after last November’s shock defeat to Cavan in the Ulster final. The subject remains so raw that during a National League press briefing earlier year, Donegal boss
Declan Bonner felt the need to intervene when his centre-back Paul Brennan was asked to describe the hurt felt by that defeat.
‘Can we move away from talk about Cavan. We have moved away from that and we have moved on to what we are doing now,’ the Donegal manager insisted.
In reality the players have not moved on from the pain of being denied what would have been a historic third Ulster title in a row and are using it for their gain this time round. It’s something Ryan McHugh acknowledged in the aftermath of his team’s 16-point win over Down that set up today’s Ulster quarterfinal clash with Derry in Ballybofey.
Given his previous life as Mayo manager, Rochford has a nose for when a team is hurting as well as a sense of where it can take them.
‘Look, there’s no doubting that last year’s loss hurt and it still hurts. If it didn’t then we’re in it for the wrong reasons,’ said Rochford, speaking at AIB’s All-Ireland Championship launch.
‘I don’t think against Down we were overly focused on it, we certainly weren’t speaking about it as a group but individually I’m sure there were guys that wanted to up their performance versus their last Championship performance.
‘There were lessons to be learned coming out of the Ulster Championship last year against Cavan, whether we’ve learned those or not, obviously the test against Down didn’t show that,’ added Rochford, who is now in his third season as Donegal coach.
Given the balance of the Donegal squad, blessed with one of the best restart kickers in Shaun Patton, a depth of defensive options beefed up by the availability of their two main man-markers in Stephen McMenamin and Odhrán McFadden Ferry, a renowned ball-winning middle eight – added to by the return of Odhrán Mac Niallais – and a high-powered attack led by Paddy McBrearty, Donegal’s issues are not personnel-centred.
However, they have built up a reputation as a team not to be trusted on the biggest occasions.
If the Cavan defeat was totally unexpected last winter, it was the latest in a damning run of damaging losses that have seen early-summer promise reduced to rubble.
For the previous three years, they have been the team to put their hand up in the early rounds of Championship as the one most likely to challenge Dublin’s dominance. They have done so again this time around, such was the level of their performance against Down – and yet they have never even made it to the final four of the All-Ireland series.
In 2018, Bonner’s first season, they won Ulster by hitting an average of 25 points per game and an average winning margin of 10 points per game.
But with the heat on in a must-win final-round game in the Super 8s against Tyrone, they let a four-point lead slip midway through the second half to lose by seven and, in the process, gave up an eight-year unbeaten record in Ballybofey .
The following season, Bonner signed up Rochford and they hit another early-summer surge – putting manners on Tyrone on the way to winning back-to-back Ulster titles. They outplayed Kerry in Croke Park but could not claim victory. It left them with yet another must-win game against Mayo, but they wilted again in the face of a hard-nosed team.
Of course, there was context – they lost Paddy McBrearty to a seasonending cruciate injury in the 2018 Ulster final and Eoghan Bán Gallagher in the build-up to the drawn Super 8s game against Kerry a year later when a grain of sand would have been enough to tilt the scales.
And then last year, they arguably backed up their most resolute performance under Bonner in beating Tyrone on a grim, tension-filled day in Ballybofey with their blitzing of Armagh.
Yet eight days after that, faced with Division 3 opposition who they had hit for 1-24 in the previous year’s Ulster final, they simply nose-dived deep into the Athletic Grounds’ heavy pitch.
This time there was no context, just the confusion that comes with going from so good to very poor inside a week.
‘How did I rationalise it?’ Rochford repeats the question. ‘I think I’m still enduring some treatment for it in so far as the performance against Armagh was satisfactory and then you go out eight days later and you’re another version of the team.
‘That’s quite frustrating for all involved. We’re not taking anything away from
Cavan, they absolutely deserved their win on the day, but we would be very disappointed with how we performed.
‘Part of that argument would be that they didn’t allow us to perform but we still had enough opportunities to get a win in that game.’
But they didn’t and inevitably it has raised queries as to whether Donegal have the nerve to match their footballing ability.
It is an accusation that points towards mental frailties in the camp.
‘I don’t believe there is (a mental block). The way sport is, the result is binary. People will put labels on the team based on a result. Go back to that game against Tyrone last year, whereby our backs were to the wall, we went into that game with no Patrick McBrearty, Neil McGee had to come off at halftime, we gave away a poor goal so there were loads of challenges presented to the lads in that game and they fashioned out the win.
‘But look, the only way that we’ll change what people think is by what we’re doing on the field.
‘At the same time, it’s not a focus for us. Nor is it a distraction trying to please others or go about trying to change those labels,’ insists Rochford.
But they will have to please themselves and that can only happen if the version of the team they want to be is the same one that shows up every day.
There have been other issues raised – not least defensive concerns, which reached their peak when they conceded four goals in the Allianz League second-round clash with Monaghan – but until such time as they show that they can knuckle down as well as thrill, that worry will not go away.
‘It’s probably part of the lesson we’ve learned that when things aren’t going our way that we’re able to roll up the sleeves and dig out the performance.
‘We just seemed to be looking to others to do it on the day against Cavan and that was disappointing because we obviously had per
‘WE HAD ENOUGH CHANCES TO WIN AGAINST CAVAN’
formed so well the previous week.
‘To come out and be another version of ourselves, that was quite frustrating and that’s the element of the knockout Championship that we’re going through. There is no second chances, you’ve got to be at your best or better than whoever you’re playing on the day.
‘There probably is a psychological part to it but it’s also about what happens within the four white lines and can a coach and management impact on that? I think we can.
‘And look, there were certainly challenges in the National League campaign especially with the sort of performance we gave against Monaghan, where we coughed up the goals that we did, but we still dug out a performance when we were nine points down with a lot of guys that were willing to stick up their hands.
‘A number of them were playing their first game since that Cavan game, so I think that our performances this year are starting to show that there’s a real toughness within that group.
‘They understand that that performance against Cavan, let alone was it not good enough to win an Ulster title, which was obvious, but it wasn’t at the level that they expect
of themselves and the standards they’re all driving and looking to drive Donegal football to,’ insists Rochford.
That drive, fuelled by hurt and ambition, will see them bring it all back home against Derry today.
The similarities with Cavan hardly need stressing. Derry are coming from the lower tiers and with a losing head-to-head record – it is 13 years and seven games since Donegal last suffered a Championship defeat to the Oak Leafers.
And yet, in an Ulster SFC that has, to date, been dominated by onesided games (the opening three ties all won by double-digit margins), this is being hyped as the game that will show how the race for the Anglo Celt Cup remains so unpredictable.
It is, in part, put down to Derry’s winning run with five straight victories this season, albeit from the third tier, and the presence of Bonner’s predecessor Gallagher running the Derry line.
Rochford believes that this represents the kind of test that Derry could deliver on, and one that was beyond his players last November.
‘Their spine is very, very strong, their team is very settled and it is obvious that the management see what their best 15 is. They hit big scores, be it from frees or from play, they are a big team, they are a mobile team so they are going to provide us with umpteen challenges, but we are looking forward to that challenge.
‘It’s a helter-skelter year. You don’t really have time to breathe, you need to be learning a bit on the go and I think in fairness to the players, they’ve shown that agility and calibrated from game to game.
‘I think we have been improving and we need to continue to improve.’
This time they must see it through.