Cranks cannot diminish what McGuinness did for his county and for football
JIM McGUINNESS remains the most interesting man in football. That is less a slight on those who are still in the game than a recognition of the role McGuinness occupies in the sport. Gaelic football has rarely seen a figure as influential, given the convulsive effect he had on the entire sport with a county that wasn’t one of its recognised powers.
A novel, precarious, and potentially spectacular Championship will be improved by the return of McGuinness as a TV analyst and columnist.
That he is now enlightening the game through insightful commentary is interesting, given his obsession with keeping details of his Donegal team’s preparations secretive.
He is not the first manager to find his tongue on leaving the sideline and sitting before the cameras, but even when he was managing his county, McGuinness was a brilliant interviewee.
While he sought to keep details of Donegal’s methods closed off, he was informative and candid himself, which had marked him out as a rarity even a decade ago.
In the years since, managers have become practically uniformly circumspect in publicly talking about their team and their sport.
Interviews are now mostly dull and largely pointless, and this does nothing to improve the climate in which the Championships are held.
Perhaps this is down to McGuinness, too.
He terrified the established counties in a way they hadn’t been rattled since the arrivals of Armagh and Tyrone at the start of the 2000s, and what Donegal did in 2011 and, of course, in 2012, obliged the standard-setters to radically revise
how they went about doing their work.
The remarkable defeat of Dublin in the 2014 All-Ireland semi-final was the last classic iteration of that Donegal team’s capacity to upend expectations, and in reacting to it, Jim Gavin radically changed how his team played the game.
Less and less became known about how Dublin, Kerry and Mayo went about their football, with the leading counties and the people in charge of them determined not to let anything slip that could be of help to their rivals.
McGuinness’s effect on the game
went way beyond frightening managers into cliché. Unlike those disruptors that had marched south from the Ulster Championship before them, his squad had no high-class pedigree.
Armagh and Tyrone had spent years developing to a point where they could compete for and win All-Irelands.
They were nourished by outstanding generations of talent and successful underage teams.
Donegal were a joke when McGuinness took them over, even if nobody connected with the county found it funny. The talents
within the group were acknowledged, but by the end of the 2000s, the county was known as a flaky, occasionally pretty force that was mostly unreliable.
McGuinness changed that, but to do so successfully meant changing how football was played.
It horrified the traditionalists, and commentators from the blueblooded places within the game.
And its impact lingers still, as was shown when news of McGuinness taking a session in Galway emerged.
One of the most exciting developments in lockdown was that jerky footage, shot from beyond the walls of Tuam Stadium, of young men being instructed in a drill by him.
It was explained away as McGuinness doing a favour for his old college friend, Pádraic Joyce, but for a day or two, there was the prospect of McGuinness returning to the game, even at a remove, and it had a th thrilling illi effect ff t on how h the th football competition was viewed.
In interviews this week, he indicated that professional coaching in soccer remains his priority, but there was enough room left in his comments for extrapolation.
He did not definitively dismiss the notion of working with a football county again, but one supposes that there are only a very few positions that would appeal to him.
And for a team to feel the full benefit of his effects, requires a lasting engagement with him in charge.
But soccer is where he sees his future, following the setback of losing his job at Charlotte Independence last year, after six months in charge.
That setback drew much predictable crowing from the bizarre constituency that seems determined to retrospectively dilute the impact he had on the game, and that wants him to fail in what comes next.
The most devoted crank could not diminish what Jim McGuinness did for his county and for football.
His ideas introduced the most exciting element a sport can possess: unpredictability.
Like all games, football has its long-standing hierarchy, and for a few years, Donegal reordered the football ladder.
His views remain valuable, even from the distance of a studio.