FADING FORCE
Donegal’s place among the elite is threatened by their inability to see out games from winning positions
IN seeking safety one last time in Markievicz Park last Sunday, Donegal only managed to put themselves in danger. With time running out, Ryan McHugh slipped the ball backwards to the advancing Shaun Patton but by the time the goalkeeper had gathered possession, he was swallowed up by two Mayo tacklers. He tried to bail himself out by taking a tumble to the ground but referee Noel Mooney wasn’t buying it and seconds later Patton’s opposite number arrowed over the resultant free-kick.
It provided the Allianz League’s opening weekend with an interesting statistic – for the third League game in a row, Mayo came from behind to draw with Donegal.
Yet, in some ways, that only scratches the surface of an issue that has dogged Donegal for much of Declan Bonner’s reign, which is now entering its fifth season.
In total, during that period, they have failed to close out seven major games having held match-winning leads in the second half. It has led to the suggestion that they lack ruthlesness.
In a way that is a cheap shot, after all they have shown themselves to be competent front-runners in big games – the 2018 and 2019 Ulster finals against Fermanagh and Cavan being examples – while they can also win tight games when coming from behind as Derry will testify from last summer’s Championship.
Nevertheless, should they take a lead into the final quarter of today’s League encounter with Kildare, the home supporters may well begin to feel a little anxious.
‘There are so many good ballplayers and point-kickers that if we get the ball and we have a purple patch we can develop leads quickly but when opponents start chipping it back it is very easy to go into a keep-ball scenario, because that is very much in the DNA of Donegal club football and Ulster club football in general,’ suggests Brendan Devenney, a League winner with Donegal in 2007.
That is exactly what happened last Sunday when, despite playing against 14 men and holding a fivepoint lead, they failed to score in the final 18 minutes.
True, the prevailing weather didn’t help but the last three points they conceded all came from turnovers inside their own half as they tried desperately to work the ball out. The conditions may have made that a necessity, but there is no escaping that this has also become the team’s default setting when trying to close out games.
‘You look at where the turnovers happened, they were in unbelievably dangerous positions in that they were in the Donegal half-back line and that is no place to be conceding possession,’ adds Devenney.
‘Once the mindset changes at all and you are no longer going at a team, then your opponents get a lift and suddenly that lead you had evaporates very quickly when you are under the cosh. And if you have a momentum swing towards the end of the game then you are in trouble because there is no getting out of it, there is no half-time, there are no water breaks any more and you have a lot of tired players on the pitch at that stage.
‘All you are doing is giving the opposition an injection of energy to come back,’ argues Devenney.
Of course, the reality is that a team that keeps pressing while possessing a lead risks being suckered on the counter, but the top teams find the balance between unacceptable risk and ultra caution, something that has proved elusive for Bonner’s team.
‘I was chatting to Keith Higgins about this recently and he was making the point that when Dublin went into keep-ball mode at the end of games, they were keeping it up in their opponent’s half, whereas Donegal are knocking the ball back to the keeper and back out again and that is so dangerous, particularly at this time of the year when you have them playing with a wet ball on heavy pitches, because it is very easy to find trouble. That’s a big difference between how Donegal play keep-ball and those who are stronger at closing out games,’ adds Devenney.
Donegal’s issue is they keep losing the same way. Not included in those games they failed to close out – because they ended up trailing at half-time – was last year’s Ulster semi-final defeat to Tyrone which they had completely controlled until Michael Murphy failed to convert a penalty that, if converted, would have pushed their lead out to five points in the second quarter.
Damningly, the only changed last Sunday was that Murphy declined to take the second-half penalty that Patrick McBrearty (left) missed, suggesting that caution has now seeped into even the strongest Donegal mind.
And if they don’t kick that habit soon, it may be fatal for them as a group.