The 2025 All Ireland Senior Football Championship (Sam Maguire Cup)

Daithi might f it up but agree, way too much made of managers in present day Gaa. I suppose there is skills required in managing an army sized backroom team but other than that it's all about players. Who was it that famously said if you want to be a great manager manage a team with great players

It is hard to believe McGuinness left it as is. I suppose Donegal got within 4 and he was tricked into thinking it was working. But Kerry casually pulled away. Effortlessly.

The amount of Donegal turnovers is what really surprised me, often when not under huge pressure. Very unlike a McGuinness managed team.

Either the pre match hype got to them or else they got nervous when the game plan didnt seem to be working early on. Hard to tell.

Kerry definitely have the potential to do dominate for many years to come.

It's the Paudi Clifford 76 possessions and no misplaced pass from all those that have people stumped. Surely he needed to be clamped down or at least pressurised. Underestimating the damage from Kerry 2 pointers was another mistake. Leaving 35 year old Murphy in a pivotal position.

I'm not one if those slating McGuinness entirely but he hadn't a good day yesterday. I'd still love if we had him when we had our very good Mayo team in 2016-17.

Is this good defending? - I'm not really sure. Where they are on the field, would you not be better to have one eye on the ball and one eye on the man instead of entirely focusing on the man. Clifford is 6"3 (I think), strong and fast as a bull, when he decides to go, you aren't going to able to stop him by pushing him away and once he gets that yard on you, you aren't getting it back. I'm not sure if there is a better way, but I would have thought if you are at least watching the ball, you might have an idea of when he is going to make his burst and prepare.

https://x.com/unspeakable28/status/1949584944575254719

Yeah McGee made Donegal competitive on long kick outs along with McFadden breaking ball so those changes helped them a lot. With about 15-20 minutes to go Donegal were probably close to even on actual scores but the 2 pointers had them still 4 down, hard to believe really as Kerry were dominant. Part of the problem though is Donegal(McGuinness) started a team Kerry dominated on both kick out and left them chasing the game. Possibly they could have tried something different on the Kerry kick outs to not have Murphy defend the short kick, maybe have him go against O’Connor and have pace maybe Moore covering the short kick but very hard when it is after a free Murphy is taking. I think though McGuinness was planning to keep the 1st half cagey and Kerry didn’t give it to them.

Saw that earlier and totally agree. He was either gonna fly past or get a free because you fouled him.
Beating him to the ball by being more alert is the only way. Or even getting a hand in to not give him clean ball. Once he went, he was went! 😁

I think he'll be persuaded to stay on.

Going for Kerry's 40th will be tempting.

Also matching Jim Gavins 6 AIs.

Also back to back.

He has a very strong panel at his disposal with possibly no players leaving.

Zonal defending is lazy defending, it isn't effective either as we often see defenses torn apart once the attacking team decide to attack, I think this is due to the art of defending one on one wasn't needed in the era of 30 players in one half.

I know the game was over but did you see how easy it was for the Kerry goal scorer yesterday, that was a very weak tackle.

The Clifford decision is the one that will haunt Jim. His expectations of himself are higher than those he has of anyone else. Like everyone in life he makes mistakes but he has the capacity to learn from them. Despite what some would hope this is not the end of Jim or this Donegal team. They will dust themselves off and will come back stronger.

What standard of Gaelic football have you played? im just curious to see where your view on tackling come from. I played as a back from 18 to 30s, I always loved tackling and never found it hard to get the ball from an opposition player. I was thinking lately id actually love to get into coaching backs, young players just starting off learning to play the game.