Can Donegal win the All-Ireland?

In Donegal this week, the rampant heat of goodwill has all but burned through the fire blanket.

Donegal are the only unbeaten team in Ireland in 2024 and right throughout the county, it’s as if they’ve already skipped ahead to Croke Park. In the middle of it all, the team itself is searching for balance. One player texts his apologies: “Trying to stay out of the media atm, which is hard in Donegal . . .”

These are good problems to have. The memory of last summer, when they couldn’t get out the other side of the championship quick enough, is still all too fresh. After beating Tyrone last weekend in Ballybofey and watching his players bob and weave towards the dressingroom as the hordes descended, Jim McGuinness referenced the change in the space of 12 months.

[ Donegal quickly put Tyrone win on ice as Jim McGuinness prepares for long road ]

“We would have bitten your hand off for that moment this time last year,” he said.

“We just have to go with it now. They have to enjoy it. There was so many children in that stadium tonight, it was crazy. The more we can do nights like tonight, there’s children sitting in the standthinking, ‘I want to be Dara Ó Baoill, I want to be Ryan McHugh, I want to be Caolan McGonagle’.

“That’s why Kerry have been so successful, in my opinion. There’s always those role models coming into the lives of young children. They’re saying, ‘Well, if he can do it, maybe I can do it’. And sometimes they’re living in the same locality, which makes it more real and more plausible. So for us, that’s not a negative. That’s definitely a positive.”

All the same, it’s probably no harm that their game this weekend is about as far away as you can go and still be on the island. There’s word of maybe around 1,000 Donegal supporters making the trip to Cork, where a victory would be highly likely to qualify them directly to the quarter-final as group winners. Win today, in other words, and it could be a month until their next game that matters. A timely release valve.

“This is going to probably sound a bit cringey but it’s true,” says Paddy McGill of the Donegal GAA Podcast. “There is a huge connection right now between the players, the management and the supporters. It’s down to three things, as far as I can see.

“One, we were at rock bottom a year ago. Two, there were three or four years previous to that when we were supposed to be the ones that made the jump to get up to the Dublins and Kerrys and we just disappointed every time. And three, the messiah is back. That’s what it all comes down to really.

“It’s pure elation. I think it’s almost suppressed feelings of what we could have done over the past number of years. The feeling is on a par with what happened between 2011 and 2014. Not the achievement yet, obviously. But everyone wants to meet the players, everyone wants to be around Jim. They want to be connected. I can only describe it as a movement. It is a movement at the moment.”

Martin Carney was in Ballybofey last weekend and felt every beat and swell of it. He’s been in and out of Donegal crowds for well over half a century and he’s seen them when they’re thick and he’s seen them when they’re thin. When Amhrán na bhFiann finished last Saturday, the woman in front of him turned and said in her best Donegal burr, “God, you sing the anthem lovely”. Nobody was throwing that sort of chat about last summer.

“I can’t get over the energy feel that’s there,” Carney says. “I can’t get over the enthusiasm and the way the whole county has come behind this McGuinness phenomenon. I watched their warm-up ahead of the first Tyrone game – they were doing it right down in front of the corner of the terrace where we were. And what fascinated me was Jim’s role in it. He was the A to Z of everything that happened in that warm-up.

“There wasn’t a selector near him, there wasn’t a bottle-carrier near him, it was McGuinness and his team. After every single drill, the team assembled automatically in a circle around him. I couldn’t hear what he was saying but you could see that he was transmitting this sense of self-belief, sense of purpose and character to them. And then they went to the next drill and when it was over, same thing – back in a circle around him. My god above, the energy he put into it.”

All of it has been radiating out. The Donegal matches have been the only part of the football championship that have held their own against the hurling. Their three games in the Ulster championship have been the only football matches this year that saw the Sold Out sign go up in the box office window. Last Saturday in MacCumhaill Park, you could maybe have fitted another 500 into the stadium. You couldn’t have fitted 1,000.

And so it falls time to introduce the rubber to the road. Where is it all going? What’s the ceiling for Donegal in 2024? They’ve already leapfrogged Derry in the betting as the Ulster side most likely to win Sam Maguire from this point but does that view really hold water? And if it doesn’t, will it ever? If not this year, when?

First, the reasons to think they might just do it.

Shaun Patton looks to have shaken off his early season injuries. Peadar Mogan has turned himself into that rare weapon – a defender the other team has to account for rather than vice versa. Oisín Gallen has matured into the player they’ve been hoping he could be. At midfield, Jason McGee and Michael Langan have, for the first time in their careers, timed a sustained period of full fitness in concert with one another.

McGee in particular has looked a player reborn. In 2023, he was on the team, off the team, subbed on, subbed off, always struggling with some sort of niggle which curtailed his game time. In this championship, he has played every minute apart from the last four against Derry. That includes extra-time against both Tyrone and Armagh – and a penalty in the shoot-out to boot.

He has also, as noted by Michael Murphy during the week, set the tone in every game with his dominance of the throw-in. Across four matches, two of which went to extra-time, McGee has gone into the middle for 12 throw-ins. He has caught six of them directly and grabbed up a seventh as he fell to the floor. Seven catches from 12 throw-ins is a huge outlier – no Dublin player has caught one in this year’s championship. Diarmuid O’Connor of Kerry has caught two.

So they have players with experience hitting a rich vein of form. None of it is a guarantee of anything, obviously, but it’s the necessary starting point. They have the McGuinness factor too, so important on and off the pitch. Whatever stops them on the way to July, it won’t be belief. McGuinness won’t allow it.

Their weaknesses? Two main ones.

For a start, we don’t know how their depth stacks up when McGuinness has to start digging down into it. When the first Tyrone game went to extra-time, McGuinness still only used 18 players, recycling his subs as the game wore on to bring Patrick McBrearty, Aaron Doherty and Dara Ó Baoill back on. He used 21 in the Ulster final but still brought Ciarán Thompson and Ó Baoill back into the mix.

“Does he have full faith in his panel?” asks Carney. “That’s something to keep an eye on. When you’re recycling three subs in an extra-time situation, maybe it suggests a bit of doubt. The other imponderable is what happens if there’s an injury to the likes of Oisín Gallen or Brendan McCole or Caolan McGonagle. If any of those central guys gets hurt, would they have the depth to cover for them?”

Secondly, the tactical heat will rise once they hit Croke Park. For all the pied piper routine, McGuinness hasn’t come back with a way of setting up his team that is significantly different from 2012. Fundamentally, Donegal are a low-defending counter-attacking team. The lesson of the past decade is that you can’t win an All-Ireland that way.

“From talking to people on the podcast, there’s a feeling that their press is maybe not incredible,” says McGill. “I’ve been to all the games since the start of the year except the Kildare one. We’re not playing with a huge amount of natural man-markers. [We’re] Playing a lot of forwards in defence, which is how Jim likes it so that they can link defence to attack.

“But against the better teams, I don’t know how it might turn out. They were four down against Armagh in the second half of the Ulster final. If that’s Kerry or Dublin, four points gets stretched out to seven and the game gets put to bed.”

The other worry for Donegal is that while they haven’t been conceding goals, they haven’t been scoring them either. Their last goal was the fourth one against Derry, on a day when the opposing goalkeeper plopped himself into a barrel and handed them a shotgun. That’s three games and two extra-times ago. All the feelgood fuzziness in the world won’t matter a damn in Croke Park if they can’t score goals.

So can Donegal win the All-Ireland? Maybe. Will they? Probably not.

But in a pretty moribund football championship so far, watching them try is a rare and welcome splash of enjoyment.