THERE is a thin line between “being a fool and a hero”.
This was Donegal manager Rory Gallagher’s frank and succinct assessment of last year’s narrow, heartbreaking Ulster SFC final defeat to Tyrone.
He also admitted he might have done things a bit differently in hindsight.
Donegal were four points ahead just after half-time and were ahead by one on 71 minutes.
However, two stupendous points from Sean Cavanagh and Peter Harte, and another from Ciaran McGeary, turned their world upside down.
On Saturday week, a young Donegal side confronts their conquerors in Ballybofey in Division One of the Allianz Football League.
Gallagher is certainly not a prisoner of the past, and he does not shun the painful memory of last July.
“It was a sore place to be a few days afterwards – you don’t feel too good about yourself,” he said.
“Every single one of our players and backroom team would have felt like that.
“Rightly Tyrone got all the plaudits, they won the game.”
Donegal shipped a lot of criticism in the aftermath of that defeat, but this is not something that bothers the Fermanagh native.
“You have to look at what the best chance we have of getting results is and we just did not attack enough in last year’s Ulster final.
“We did not attack with enough conviction but Tyrone defended very well and we can’t hide from the age profile of our team.
“We have more legs in the team this year, which allows us to have more energy but those were the lads that I went with last year and it is a thin line between victory and defeat.
“We were very close and were 0-11 to 0-10 up and we won a kick-out and we lost a ball at the end of the field and if we had went two up it was probably game over.”
Gallagher added that the two marvellous points scored by Cavanagh and Harte was “probably a sore point”.
“Were we marking them tight enough when they kicked them over the bar?
“Peter Harte is well capable of drilling balls over the bar from 55-58 yards, and if we had defended those situations better we would have won the game.
“We can only look at ourselves and ask: did we ultimately do enough to win it? You can’t say we did and I would not for one minute say we did.
“If the game had ended after 40 minutes, I would have said that we deserved to win it, but we did not do enough to win it over the 70 minutes.”
Gallagher said Tyrone were now developing players who can score from long distances out.
“If you look at their final point from Ciaran McGeary, that was quite a distance out as well.
“They have developed players like Tiernan McCann and Niall Sludden to kick those type of points and in tight competitive games you need players for that.”
So would Gallagher have done anything differently that day last July?
“I probably would have done a few things defensively different, but I am not going to say what they are.
“There is no doubt you look at it and say to yourself: is there a few things you could have done differently?
“But that is the same thing for every single game you play and every game you lose.”
