Listen: Donegal manager Curran: 'The girls know they are as good as anyone'

Donegal manager Maxi Curran and his team pulled off something of a coup on Saturday in the TG4 All-Ireland Ladies Football Senior Championship quarter-final against Dublin.

Donegal have a decent record against Dublin - two league wins and two championship defeats - but with the Leinster champions having appeared in every All-Ireland final since 2014, the odds were stacked against Curran and his team. However, a shrewd Donegal had a gameplan and stuck with it to win out 3-7 to 1-7, with Yvonne Bonner and a Karen Guthrie brace of goals in the second half proving key.

Donegal kept things tight, and although Carla Rowe managed to bundle home one for Dublin in the last minute, it was never going to change the outcome.

"Any day we played Dublin we were always hopeful and full of belief that we could get over the line,” he said. “Today we played for 60 minutes when the plan we had laid out. We were very confident that if we didn’t concede a goal then we wouldn’t lose today - I know they did manage one in the last minute but at that stage we were pretty comfortable. 

“Meath have shown the template on how you might be successful against a team like Dublin,” he added. “We conceded big goals before at big stages before, so we just felt if we can keep them out and keep the game under our control, we felt that we then have the forwards who can get the important scores. Dublin put a few really good moves together but just didn’t get the shooters on the end of it. Maybe Dublin just didn’t expect us to play that way. We’re just delighted the girls stuck to the plan.