The 2015 All Ireland Senior Football Championship

Boom__Boom wrote: »

Pretty sure Dont Foul has some stuff on the low number of goal chances Donegal let teams have.

Missed the 2013 Laois qualifier and haven't completed the Armagh game from this year yet but the goal attempts Donegal have conceded since the start of 2012 are (oldest first)

2 1 3 1 1 3 1 3 0 1 9 (Mayo QF '13) 1 0 2 1 5 (Dublin '14 SF) 4 (Kerry '14 F) 6 (Tyrone '15) 2

intellectual dosser wrote: »

If you're on the boil a bit having to respond to people here then I understand, but if you actually thought this was true then surely Jim Gavin would have been relieved of his duties shortly after?

Your logic does not follow. Dublin showed in that game that they easily had the beating of that Donegal side, and had they just continued to play as they had done for the entire year they would have done just that.

So why did they stop playing towards the end of the 1st half? I can suggest reasons and not all of them were Jim Gavins fault. The Dublin players slacking off in a match in which they were yet again cruising to victory does not automatically mean Gavin should have been sacked.

intellectual dosser wrote: »

It's been 10 months and you're the first Dublin supporter I've seen take this angle.

Donegal were better, 6 points better. You're going to have to make peace with it.

This year, whole new story.

I'm not a Dublin supporter.

gormdubhgorm wrote: »

You have just shown the flaw in your argument Dublin "had" the beating of Donegal easy. But they did not win.
1) They went too hung ho in attack been exposed to doneagal on the break.

Your recollection is faulty. When Dublin were on the attack they had no problems handling Donegal. It was only when they stopped pressing and dropped intensity that they started being exposed.

It was not Donegals master plan that caused Dublin to suddenly stop pressing the ball, unless you seriously believe that master plan also included letting Dublin spank them around the field for the first 20 minutes.

Donegal were lucky against Dublin. After the first 25 minutes, Donegal outscored Dublin 3-10 to 0-8.

How fortuitous Donegal were that Dublin decided to sit back and allow themselves to be comprehensively beaten - maybe even hammered in another man's language.

I am amazed at just how overkill the analysis on the Donegal v Dublin game are from last year. Fact of the matter is, a combination of game plan, tactics, bounce of the ball luck/bad luck on the day and quality players taking their chances/missing chances among other noticed and un-noticed factors outside of planned tactics and gameplan is what accumulates the final result.

On that particular day Donegal were ultimately the better team and won, end of.

What I particularly noticed from a Dublin perspective, there was no real difference between last years semi-final and the 2013 semi-final against Kerry in the sense that our vulnerability was exposed at the back shipping 3 goals due to our all out attacking approach.

On another day Declan O'Sullivan's narrow wide before the kick-out that led to MacAuley's flicked pass to McManamon's goal would have worked out in O'Sullivan nailing his point and MacAuley not getting the break on that loose ball resulting in a Kerry win.

With the top teams the main differences can be minuscule resulting in amplified outcomes, eg; Mayo v Kerry - very little to seperate them over 160+ minutes of football but the overall outcome is Kerry going on to become All-Ireland champions and Mayo left licking their wounds and leading to a new management team in 2015.

Sport is not an exact science, big guns clash, sometimes it's tight, other times it can be one sided either way on any given day for any number of unforeseen reasons.....

That's why we love it I suppose!

Jayop wrote: »

I'm going to predict an all Ireland final of Donegal Vs Dublin again.

Again! they only met once in the final and that was 1992, but it does seem like more.

I would agree with your prediction 100% and I'm still not sure of Dublin. They mightn't get a decent game until the final which isn't good for them.

But Donegal/Dublin or Kerry/Dublin would be great for the fans.

Boom__Boom wrote: »

One thing on the Armagh Galway game I can see it being an absolute munter of a game to ref - both of the teams have exceptionally poor tackling technique - Armagh seem to think that a legitimate tackle is aimed to the man as opposed to the ball and Galway seem to have a loose, lazy style of tackling that I would describe as "throwing hands"

This bad tackling by both sides has contributed to a very high number of frees conceded by both so far in the championship.

Was thinking of this a bit more and had a look online at some of the match reports - I did remember reading after the Galway Leitrim game that the Leitrim manager was surprised at how much Galway fouled. Anyway found an article that said Galway had 42 frees awarded against them. Then in the Mayo game the ref penalised them for 32 fouls. I couldnt find anything about the New York game - coverage was very scarce. However 74 frees conceded in 2 games is just ridiculous stuff.

For Armagh I found a total of 23 frees awarded against them in the Donegal game - you'd assume that any team playing Michael Murphy would have as it's key aims not to concede frees, given how far out he can hit them from, but Armagh was so clueless on the day you'd have to question whether they even managed to do this a little bit. Donegal ended up scoring 5 points from frees. Couldnt find anything about the number of frees in the Wicklow game but one match report mentioned the fact that Wicklow had a disaster in terms of free-taking and put 8 kickable frees wide only converting 1. That total of 9 would only be the ones rated kickable, so you'd assume that Armagh's overall frees given away figure would be well into double-digits and it would be no surprise to me if it was over the 20 frees conceded amount.

From what I've seen in a very limited amount of games generally the number of kickable frees tends to be less than the non-kickable frees, which makes sense as pretty much every team is far more willing to foul in the parts of the field where a free isn't kickable. Also the amount of non-kickable frees conceded is probably related to the tackling ability/willingness of forwards and midfielders to commit fouls as it is extremely rare that the punishment for committing a foul is a score against their team.

As a comparison in terms of what top teams do Donegal conceded 10 frees in total in their game against Armagh in a game where Armagh's primary tactic was running into the contact with the Donegal defence. The first kickable free Donegal conceded was in the 47th minute. You starve a team of frees, especially scorable ones, you are starving them of those little momentum power-ups. Even if it's only conceding non-scorable frees to teams, you are still handing them back possession and a platform to go forward.

Anyway long story short don't be a bit surprised if you hear nonsense about the ref not letting the game flow and the game being a bit stop-start after the game. If it's a free ridden affair it will be because both teams are hopeless in terms of playing within the rules. Would be no surprise if a large part of the winning and losing of this game comes down to whatever team is better at converting their frees on the day.

Whoever ends up as ref for this is odds on to earn his petrol money and while I'm almost tempted to say I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy, there are a couple of the intercounty refs, whom I wouldn't be overly concerned if they end up having to deal with the likely nonsense.

Jayop wrote: »

I don't see it as being as bad as that. There'll be lots of frees but it won't be a particularly bad tempered affair because in reality both teams are playing out to see who is going to be beat in the next round anyway.

The teams won't be remotely thinking about the next round and definitely won't be of the opinion that the match is an irrelevance because of their next round opponents .

Galway were seriously cranky against Mayo (picked up a serious chunk of cards) in addition to the frees conceded and Armagh have a fairly well-established tradition of being a mite cantankerous. The fact that Galway committed 42 frees against Leitrim gives a massive insight into what Galway's approach is likely to be.

Both McGeeney and Walsh will be under a serious chunk of pressure if they got knocked out, and I could easily see that being reflected by their teams.