“It was a diluted version of what we were” – Why ‘Donegal system’ didn’t work for others

“I’m open to anything that makes sense for me professionally and in terms of my own development,” he says. I have had a very good journey up to this point and have been learning a huge amount along the way.

“My focus is definitely on soccer. When you are back in Ireland and you are asked to go in and all (with GAA teams), it whets the appetite for you; there’s no doubt about that. But my focus is on soccer and the journey that I’ve been on development-wise and trying to fulfill that, that’s where my focus is, yeah…”

He doesn’t rule out a move to a League of Ireland club but for now it’s back to the Gaelic football analysis. His take on it is that Dublin have the advantage once again heading into this championship because just like when teams tried to copy his system with Donegal, replicating won’t beat pioneering. In that sense, he feels teams are trying and failing, to beat Dublin at their own game

“Everyone’s playing the same way but they’re playing the Dublin way. So you can look at how things are being done in another county but the way it is actually done in another county is a different thing. That was the fallout from us winning the All-Ireland, in my opinion. We won the All-Ireland with a defensive set-up and a serious transitional game.

“When teams tried to replicate that they weren’t privy to the mechanism that made that system work and for me a lot of the systems were lacking the intensity that we had and the capacity to push up and get pressure and break and how you broke and where you wanted to move the ball to when you were breaking and support men inside and runners off that and all of those things so it was a diluted version of what we were, if that makes sense, and so you’ve a situation now where Dublin, they were this kicking team, they morphed from a kicking team to 14-plus-one at the back with Cian O’Sullivan and everybody dropping to the top of the D as well but, at the end of the day, it’s their system and I think that’s what’ll give them an advantage in that regard, you know.”

One thing he feels could lend some spice to this championship is the straight knock-out factor, which might bring that bit of ‘rawness’ back to the games.

“My big thing for this Championship is, will it go back to what it was like when we were playing, when I was playing myself. There was a rawness, you know…

There was a rawness. There was always an awful lot of red cards and sending offs and everything when we were playing. A lot of that was due to the fact that you were building towards this one game and there was no tomorrow and that buildup would have been six, nine months in the making and people then just overheated sometimes. There was so much going into it that sometimes people didn’t just control themselves. I think the qualifiers have sort of taken away that edge to an extent. I know it always sort of resurfaces around quarter-final, semi-final, final stages but now it’s going to be there from the very first game on the very first day and I’m just really intrigued to see how explosive these games could potentially be.

There’s a part of me thinks they could be (explosive) and there’s another part of me that thinks the way that teams are setting up at the minute and this serious focus on possession football, it’s hard to see how that can happen because the sparks fly when the ball is 50-50, but the ball is never 50-50 now, the ball is 90-10 or 80-20 all the time because the team in possession are just really good on the ball and the other team is what I would call shadow tackling, they’re three or four metres off them. So it’s not really about that initial furious pressure to turn the ball over. It’s about can you get enough pressure on the guy kicking the ball or fisting the ball so that the next guy can get the pressure on, and that’s a different model.”