The poor decision was not McBrearty’s alone

FOOTBALL is a game of decisions as much as it’s a game of skill and as much as it’s battle of wills. It’s about doing the right thing in the right place at the right time.

Players make decisions every second of every game. To go forward in support or to stay back and mind your man, mind the house. To pass or not to pass and to whom and how, to kick it or to deploy a lower risk hand pass.

To tackle or not to tackle. To put your hand in knowing the referee might mistake an honest attempt to get hand or fist to ball as something more nefarious. Sometimes it’s a decision to foul or not to foul, to weigh up whether it’s worth sacrificing a black or a yellow card for the good of the team.

Decisions to make a run for a ball which might never arrive. Decisions to hang onto the ball and wait for a better chance, to recycle it or instead to lean back and pull the trigger.

Decisions are what separate the wheat from the chaff. One poor decision can be the difference between success and failure, between victory and defeat, between survival and relegation as Donegal found to their cost last weekend.

When the ball found its way to Paddy McBrearty, with less than a minute remaining to be played and the home side a point in front, the Donegal faithful in Ballybofey probably sighed a sigh of relief.

If there was anybody they would have wanted on the ball in that moment it was him. The silken skills, the beautiful balance, the sweet left boot, the vision and the football brain.

The trouble was the Kilcar man wasn’t at his best, wasn’t fully fit. After kicking some wonder scores in the first half he was visibly struggling over those closing exchanges. Not surprising considering he was just back from injury.

A fatigued player is less likely to make the right decision and so it proved. He operated more on instinct in that moment than on a cleareyed assessment of what needed to be done taking into account Donegal’s position in the match and the league table.

McBrearty took possession of the ball on the right and shuffled leftwards to in front of the sticks. With men outside him making themselves available for the pass, he opted instead to take a snap shot off his left, dropping short into David Clarke’s hands.

It was the absolute worst thing he could have done. At the very least if he was taking a shot he had to put the ball dead, having it drop short allowed Mayo counter, having it drop short instead of wide meant that Donegal had less time to set up and see out the game. Ideally McBrearty would have held onto the ball. Ideally he would have passed to a colleague. He didn’t and the rest – and Kevin McLoughlin’s thirteen steps in the lead up to the equalising point – is history.

McBrearty has since come in for a lot of stick. Joe Brolly for instance – typically over the top – blasted him as an “eejit” on Twitter. Obviously it wasn’t McBrearty’s finest hour, but it’s hardly grounds for labelling him an eejit. Besides focussing solely on McBrearty and laying all the blame on his shoulders is pretty short-sighted. As we’ve said the man was out on his feet by seventy one or seventy two minutes, should not the manager have called him ashore?

Declan Bonner’s decision to leave McBrearty on the pitch and to instead take off Jamie Brennan, who’d been performing much better than his colleague in the second half, was equally if not more consequential than McBrearty’s to take that snap shot. One poor decision led to another.

It led to another defeat for Donegal in a game they could have won and should have won. That’s the story of Donegal’s league campaign. Authors of their own misfortune, unable to see out games and making a similar set of mistakes all the way through.

Think back to their first game of the year against Kerry in Fitzgerald Stadium. They seemed to have Kerry beaten at least twice in that match. Both times, however, they let the Kingdom back into the game. When they took the lead with a Stephen McBrearty goal on seventy one minutes – things taking a wrong turn in injury time is a bit of a recurring theme for Donegal it seems – they really should have been able to see the thing out.

For all their promise – and again on Sunday they were the better team playing the better football – that lack of a killer instinct is a serious concern. What happened on the weekend wasn’t a one off and it wasn’t (totally) McBrearty’s fault. Relegation, of course, is not the end of the world – Donegal are much better placed to cope with relegation than Mayo – nor is all hope is lost ahead of the championship. It just means that Donegal aren’t as far along in their development – players and management – as we thought they might be.

As long as the Tír Chonaill men learn from their mistakes they can get back to where they want to be.