DONEGAL team manager Jim McGuinness has spoken for the first time of his “disbelief” and shock at Kevin Cassidy’s revelations about the Donegal team in a book published in 2011.
A stunned McGuinness admitted that he initially thought it was “some kind of f*****g joke” when he first saw it serialised in the Donegal News.
McGuinness axed Cassidy from the squad in November 2011 after a meeting in the Clanree Hotel, also attended by current boss and former assistant Rory Gallagher.
The decision split the county as many felt that Cassidy was highly complimentary to his boss.
But writing in his memoir Until Victory Always, launched in Glenties last night, McGuinness revealed that Cassidy had been “acknowledging that he was over the line... But he showed no remorse”.
McGuinness said Cassidy’s “accounts of our training, of what was said in private about other managers, of our team meetings, tactics, game plans, performance goals... all of this laid out in newsprint, and more of it in a book and you are speechless”.
“Thinking this must be some kind of f*****g joke, Kevin wouldn’t do this More than anything you want to know why.
“So why this? Kevin is a bit of a warrior, a former team-mate and he can play half-back or midfield and he can take a score, that’s why you asked him out of retirement”.
McGuinness added that Cassidy showed no remorse at that meeting in the Clanree Hotel and suggests that it had something to do with “stubbornness”.
He said he told Cassidy that his action had compromised everything the squad had been about all year.
“This broke the trust within the group,” McGuinness writes.
“There is no acknowledgement from Kevin and then Rory, sensing a decision and looking across at you, saying, ‘Hold on, are you sure?’
“Rory wants this resolved but there is a line between keeping your core values and holding on to your best players... no other way to go.
“You are leaving me with no choice, Kevin.
“A horrible moment, very heavy and very grave, nothing to do with personality. It would have been the same if it had been any other player but Cass is a big player and who wants to lose a player like that.
“Axing a senior player, a former team-mate, and an Allstar for giving interviews to a book. It still broke what we held sacred.
“In the newspapers and on the radio over the following days, there are more words, dark, uncompromising, vindictive, cold, ‘a leader of sheep’.
“Let them talk, let them write...bigger things to worry about.”
