Donegal too hot to handle in Ulster final win
THIS amounted to a finger in the eye of Arlene Foster’s critics, who had argued that she lacks the political nous and diplomatic skills to get Stormont back on its governing feet.
Well, this represented a start, as she became the first Unionist leader to attend the Ulster final, but Ulster council chiefs must have been left peering through their fingers as the VIP Box as this thing rolled.
Had she left after 15 minutes, when the outstanding Eoghan Ban Gallagher arrived at the back post to flick Ryan McHugh’s fisted cross to the net to put Donegal four points clear, she could have sparked yet another diplomatic crisis.
After all, conventional thinking, which suggested that if Donegal got a jump start there would be no way back for her native Fermanagh, revealed itself to be head-onthe-nail foresight. But even though the result was already gone out the gap, she did the right thing and stayed right through to the painful end, in an exhibition of tolerance which can only ignite hope of a new way. It could be that Arlene was unaware that Fermanagh’s defensive gameplan meant they were not equipped to chase a game. In her defence, it could be argued that Fermanagh also forgot but Rory Gallagher decided it was better not to die wondering. The price for that, though, is that they died quickly.
To Fermanagh’s credit they threw a curve ball early on by going bald-headed for it in a manner that few could have envisaged. Their strategy was simple; they went long on their own kick-outs — they won their first four — and when they got into position they committed bodies into attack in the hope of getting an early lead.
Unfortunately, it worked the other way. The warnings signs were there as early as the 13th minute when Michael Langan’s burst through the unoccupied middle on the counter to pop over a point, which gave Donegal a lead they would not lose.
It also exposed the cliff-edge risk value of Fermanagh’s strategy; turnovers in attack left them vulnerable on the counter.
They fell off that cliff two minutes later when Eoin Donnelly was turned over and Langan once more powered through a threadbare centre to set up that clutch opening goal. After that this thing was done, but it would be wrong to just dismiss how Donegal closed this out.
Gallagher’s cold comfort is that there is nothing he could have done on his tactical whiteboard to stop this rampaging Donegal bandwagon. In the space of the three months, they have gone from relegation fodder to a top four team, which equips them with the kind of momentum that no other team enjoys.
The party line may well be that they have scaled their pre-season summit in making the Super 8s, but the truth is that with every passing game that now has more the feel of base camp.
That good? That’s what the evidence suggests. The easy line to peddle is to suggest that they are playing to a new beat under Declan Bonner, with a sense of freedom and expression that was their way in the Jim McGuinness and Gallagher years.
That is true, but they have also profited from their education along the way. Donegal now possess the quality to sugar the eyeball and playing on the front foot suits, but they also possessed the smarts when faced with a game from football’s mean streets.
Patience was also their friend here — never more so that in that crunch opening quarter when they were dominated — but then that was a virtue they honed under Gallagher’s watch, and the master’s education came back to bite him here. They waited and forced the Fermanagh errors,
which changed this game.
Above all, it is their quality in every line and every sector which makes them such a hard nut to crack. They possess the ball winners — after Fermanagh’s bright start they targeted Patrick Cadden’s restarts, winning four on the bounce in the second quarter — to physically dominate opponents and the ball players to hurt.
Here’s a stat to frighten; Michael Murphy and Paddy McBrearty managed just two points between them in open play. By the end, they were joined by 11 others, an astonishing measure of the spread of their attacking menace.
That quality shone through as bright as the searing sun yesterday, never more than in Ryan McHugh, who excelled yet again.
It is hard to believe that there is a better heads-up footballer in the game, while those dancing feet of his leaves opponents in a trance-like state.
Pity poor Kane Connor, who was left with twisted blood, when McHugh wriggled past him in the 29th minute to fire to the back of the net. That put Donegal eight clear 2-5 to 0-3. As if things could not get any worse in a dreary second half, Ryan Jones founds a way when he picked up two bookings inside three minutes.
And still Arlene sat her way through the whole thing. In the end, she might just have left feeling that the chasm between the two communities is not as wide as we make out. After all, both are into their processions.