Football needs people like Jim, he’s a disruptor, he’s driven and single-minded

IT WILL be a year next Tuesday since Donegal went to Páirc Esler and crashed out of the Ulster Championship against Down.

It was just a few weeks after a miserable League campaign — with just one win — that ended in relegation to Division Two.

Go back to that time and the humour — and talk — in Donegal was bleak.

There were genuine fears expressed by football people that Donegal might end up in the Tailteann Cup before too long.

There was talk of us going the same way as Derry — from Division One to Four.

Now look where we are. Promotion was secured with ease, and Donegal go to Celtic Park this evening to take on reigning champions Derry with genuine hope and belief.

This game will be the barometer of how far the team have travelled since Jim McGuinness returned as manager.

Winning Division Two is all well and good but that final and the Division One were night and day.

Derry reached a level way ahead of any team Donegal came up against this year. Outside of travelling to Dublin or Kerry, there is no bigger test right now than going toe to toe with Derry on their own turf.

Donegal’s preparation has been typical of the way McGuinness operates.

The squad went away for a weekend. We don’t know where because Jim is a great admirer of the way North Korea operates. Secrecy is everything.

But the most important preparation has been done between Jim’s ears ever since the Ulster Championship draw was made.

Hours

Take the wildest of guesses and I wouldn’t say you’d come anywhere near the amount of hours of Derry games Jim has watched. He’ll know all their phases of play, their patterns of movement, what each player does on and off the ball.

When you take the kind of deep dive on opponents that Jim favours, unlikely things pop up.

We’re looking from the outside and figuring you man mark Shane McGuigan and come up with a way to nullify the influence of Conor Glass and Brendan Rogers around the middle. Get those right and you’re on the way. But Jim will dig deep, far deeper. He will find chinks in Derry’s armour nobody else has noticed. Derry played a certain way under Rory Gallagher and Jim would have had a good grasp of that.

But Mickey Harte and Gavin Devlin have taken that just as a foundation and built a structure of their own.

My old captain, Michael Murphy, is dabbling in the writing business now and he pointed out in a column how Derry and our Donegal team are different.

Derry have been on a more gradual curve than the one we were on. We rose fairly rapidly and then dropped off badly after 2014.

Derry have been one of the best teams for a few years now. That makes it harder to spring something new but I think the management will have something different ready for Donegal.

From working with Jim, I think this won’t faze him. It was uncanny how often he’d predict what opponents were going to do before we played them.

That comes down to doing a deep dive and long hours of hard graft.

Why are so many people in football hostile to Jim, though? Pat Spillane came out with stuff about Jim’s pressing being nothing new and that Kerry did it under Mick O’Dwyer.

Why would you reference games from nearly 50 years ago as some kind of one upmanship?

I haven’t heard Jim boasting about inventing pressing, so why the animosity?

Donegal would be seen in a couple of counties — Kerry is definitely one — as upstarts who lost the run of themselves for a while.

Then they slipped back into the pack and these traditionalists were delighted.

The natural order had been restored, it seems. All they seem to want is Dublin v Kerry every year until the next Big Bang.

To me, football needs people like Jim. He’s a disruptor, he’s driven and very single-minded.

He is incredible at getting a squad focused on the one goal.

Is he infallible? Of course not. I find with a lot of brilliant people that they have glaring flaws.

I’ve seen it with everyone from Jim Gavin to Alex Ferguson to Jurgen Klopp. Jim is flawed too, but he’s one of the most fascinating people in the GAA.

His journey with Donegal, his soccer adventure and ambition, his return to Gaelic football ... he should be welcomed and enjoyed.

Remember the fuss about the security fence that he had erected at the training centre in Convoy?

Could that money have been spent on better? Undoubtedly. But I see where Jim was coming from.

Guard

He’s effectively telling his players ‘this is our place, out there is everyone else and f*** them all’.

Jim was my manager for four years and I only talked to him when he had his guard down after he stepped down.

That was in Leo’s bar at 3am after his book launch and it struck me that it was our first conversation in years as just two fellas chatting.

We had a run-in on the field years ago. We were playing Naomh Conaill in Magheragallon and I hit him late at one stage, telling him ‘you’re not fit to lace my boots’.

When I was designated to man mark Sean Cavanagh in 2013, Jim told me to track him everywhere, saying ‘sure you did it to me in Magheragallon’. Thing is, I was never told to do that to Jim that day, I just decided to be a hateful hoor.

So how will the game go? I think Donegal will really put huge pressure on Odhran Lynch’s kick-outs and they have talented players and the x-factor that Jim will bring.

But this is a massive step up and Derry are just further down the road at the moment.

I expect a really good game and a Derry win by four points.