Cahair O’Kane: Everything Donegal have done in 2025 has been about Kerry

Cahair is a sports reporter and columnist with the Irish News specialising in Gaelic Games.

Ryan McHugh of Donegal tries to escape from Ryan Wyile of Monaghan during Saturday's All-Ireland quarter-final. McHugh's role in the team has been very different this year. Picture: Oliver McVeigh

WHEN asked at various intervals across 2025 who would win the All-Ireland, my answer has always been the same.

I have been torn 51% to 49% between Donegal and Kerry all year.

But the 51% has been Donegal for one very simple reason: Everything about the way they play is built around meeting Kerry in Croke Park.

It’s been my firm belief since the early part of the league that Jim McGuinness has taken a gamble similar to the one he took in 2014.

Then, no matter who Donegal’s next opponent was, he spent every spare hour he had watching Dublin in the expectation that they’d run up against them somewhere.

Eye off the ball, they scraped out of an All-Ireland quarter-final against Armagh by a point. Two weeks later, they delivered a gameplan months in the making.

This time, McGuinness has looked at how the landscape had been altered by the new rules.

The biggest threat was always likely to be Kerry kicking to David Clifford.

Their economy of effort in terms of scoring was traditionally their greatest asset.

Where every other team would have to carve scores out of stone, the Kerry way was so ingrained.

It remains so. Despite everything that has changed about Gaelic football in the last 20 years, the movement of Kerry’s inside forwards is still synchronised to a kick-passing game.

The second they think a pass is on, they’re gone, skating across the turf.

When they see space in front of them, unlike most teams who will keep their full-forward line really deep and run it through the space, Kerry’s forwards are screaming for the kick.

It’s so instinctive that when it clicks, it’s incredibly difficult to deal with.

But Sunday’s win over Armagh was not built on that.

Armagh’s defensive system is pretty similar to Donegal’s.

Barry McCambridge went everywhere with David Clifford. That is the same role Brendan McCole has played in every game. He’s tagged the opposition’s main forward. They haven’t man-marked anyone else.

To the naked eye, you might think Ryan McHugh has had a relatively quiet year.

But he is not being asked to do the job he used to. Line-breaking wing-back is not his role.

In the absence of Caolan McGonagle, McHugh is their out-and-out sweeper.

When they lose the ball, he puts his head down and diligently gets right into the pocket of space in front of the full-forward.

There have been times throughout the year that his role in that regard has been almost completely redundant.

It was fascinating to watch how Monaghan attacked Donegal in a way that nobody else has.

Almost every team copycats the trend now of loading up the full-forward line with decoys and creating space between there and the arc for shooters.

Monaghan did not do that.

Instead, their runners went and stood on Ryan McHugh and Eoghan Bán Gallagher.

And then they did something really unique – they actually asked for the ball. And they got it. Monaghan popped it in and out between the lines of Donegal’s zonal defensive system. And it was brilliant.

The energy they expended to carry it off coupled with Donegal having the breeze and being able to stretch the game and get their hands on more primary possession meant Monaghan just couldn’t sustain it.

But Gabriel Bannigan, Andy Moran and John McElholm deserve so much credit.

Their first half was by far the outstanding tactical display of 2025 – until Sunday.

Kerry did some number on Armagh. It was entirely based around kickouts from both ends.

For someone to whom Tomás Ó Sé’s criticism a few years back really stuck, the common denominator in the trajectories of teams he’s been around has been Cian O’Neill.

Galway were only bobbing along until he joined in 2022. They reached two All-Ireland finals in three years. He left and they were a shadow of themselves this year.

Sunday was the most tactically shrewd performance of Jack O’Connor’s latest reign. Coincidental?

What was great about it was that they used so little of the kick-passing game.

They manipulated Armagh’s zonal defence. Clifford pulled McCambridge everywhere. And what the system didn’t account for was Seanie O’Shea.

He took seven shots from play.

For his first shot, he was up against Niall Grimley. Shot two, Tiernan Kelly and Jarly Og Burns. Shot three, Andrew Murnin. Shot four, Ben Crealey. Shot five, Oisin Conaty. Shot six, Paddy Burns and Peter McGrane. Shot seven, Aidan Forker.

The zonal defence doesn’t designate man-markers to anyone outside the full-forward line.

Donegal defend in largely the same way.

And in watching how Sean O’Shea disfigured the Armagh cover, Jim McGuinness has been left with a decision to make.

Oisin Conaty did it to his zonal cover in the Ulster final. Even in Ballybofey last weekend, Ryan Burns did it briefly out of the same pocket down the right-hand side of their defence. But the system is the system. They stick to it no matter what and trust it’ll see them right in the end.

Where Donegal are also very similar to Armagh is in their kickout plan. They deviate from the norm in that rather than congregating in groups, it’s all about spacing out, creating 1v1s and crashing the break.

The Donegal manager’s post-match comments on Saturday were really telling in that regard.

When asked what had changed tactically at half-time to facilitate the game flipping on its head, McGuinness said: “We didn’t change anything, to be honest, because we had the work done, we had the plan going into the game done. We just doubled down on that. We didn’t change any personnel, we just trusted the fellas to get it right themselves.”

The fact that Sean O’Shea hurt the zonal defence and Kerry crippled Armagh’s kickout in the same way Monaghan did Donegal’s in the first half will deeply concern McGuinness.

But they are forewarned.

This column might be taken as presuming a Donegal-Kerry final. It is not.

I do expect Donegal to beat Meath.

Tyrone have a great chance against Kerry.

They have two weeks to study that and come up with ways to avoid getting cleaned out in the air.

It was something Tyrone did really well against Dublin. Between Brian Kennedy’s positioning against Peadar Ó Cofaigh Byrne and Niall Morgan’s clever use of Conn Kilpatrick along the sideline, they found ways out.

Mark O’Shea was a real bolter for Kerry. He was superb in facilitating and executing what they wanted to do on Armagh’s kickout. But the surprise element is gone. Everyone else can now think of how to counteract that.

The other three teams left in the race will have seen Kerry dominate possession and kick 0-32.

That’s a flashing red light around the idea of letting them repeatedly win your kickout.

Donegal’s set-up is built around discouraging a kick-pass from the opposition.

Monaghan, Armagh and Down in particular have come up with inventive questions for them this summer.

They will stick to the zonal defence against Meath.

They would have planned to stick to it against Kerry, but Sean O’Shea’s performance will have made them think twice.

Ultimately, they’ll back themselves to be better at getting pressure on the shot around the arc than Armagh were.

Their setup has been nine months in construction.

All year, it’s been Donegal 51 Kerry 49 in my head. Nothing last weekend changed that.

It’s a final that might not even happen.

But if it does, Donegal will be happy enough – because their entire year has been about Kerry.

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