Donegal disappoint but second-half reaction a positive - Brendan Kilcoyne

Donegal minor mentor Brendan Kilcoyne felt Donegal were flat and never got going in the first-half against Monaghan in Saturday’s final group game in the Ulster MFC.

But the former St Eunan’s championship winning player and manager was much happier with Donegal’s performance in the second period though he also admitted Monaghan were still the deserving winners.   

“We are disappointed,” he said after. “We came up here to win today - to get a win which would ensure a home quarter-final and unfortunately that is not how it worked out. 

“You have to give all the credit to Monaghan, they brought all the energy in the first-half. We seemed flat. But in fairness, our second-half performance was much improved and we showed a little more fight.” 

Donegal struggled big time on the Farney kickouts in that troublesome opening spell and as a result were under siege for much of the first half hour in their 0-14 to 0-11 loss in Clones.  

“We just couldn’t get our kickouts away,” Kilcoyne explained. “We seemed to be outnumbered every time the ball  came out around the middle of the park and that was because Monaghan were more tuned than we were in that area.

“We suffered because they won a lot of possession and that gave them territory. We struggled to get the ball up the field and any time we did we were turned over too easily.” 

Monaghan’s central attackers, Max McGinnity at centre-half forward and Matthew Finn, in the number 14 shirt, inflicted the most pain. McGinnity ended the game with a personal tally of 0-8, the bulk of them from frees and Finn who was the ‘go to’ man inside, contributed 0-3 of the locals’ total. 

“We knew those two players were going to be a threat.  McGinnity punished us from frees though you may question that some of them may be soft but they were given and we know you cannot make too much contact in that area. 

“You try and coach these boys to tackle correctly and it is all up to the referee what is a legitimate tackle and what isn’t a tackle. 

“Overall Monaghan were the better team on the day and we can’t dispute that but there were positives in the second-half.

“We are going to have to dust ourselves down and get ready for a quarter final away to Cavan next weekend.”