'Hitting the monkey a punch on the face, maybe': Donegal ladies gear for League final

The chance looked gone when Katy Herron went for broke.

Donegal were trailing Dublin by four points in the Lidl Division 1 semi-final at St Tiernach’s Park.

The clock was ticking perilously close to the buzzer when Herron let fly.

Time seemed to stand still as the ball thundered off the crossbar. In the blink of an eye, Emma McCroary finished to the net and the impossible, all of a sudden, was possible.

Just 23 seconds later, Yvonne Bonner intercepted the kick-out and tucked into an empty net.

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A most remarkable turnaround was completed and Donegal were bound for a first Division 1 final in five years.

“I probably wasn’t close enough to shoot, but I looked at the scoreboard and I knew there wasn’t much time left,” Herron said.

“I just put my head down and went for it. Luck was definitely on our side.

“That’s probably the first time in a long time that we have seen a game out like that. That’s a big positive for us.”

Donegal will face Meath, the reigning All-Ireland champions, on April 10 at Croke Park - a game that will give Maxi Curran and his players real preparation for their Championship campaign.

The Donegal manager said: “We have three massive weeks of training. It’s such a treat for any footballer to get to Croke Park. We’ll be all the better for it come the summer, let alone in three weeks’ time.

“Getting another competitive game is absolutely massive. It’s a real bonus that it’a a final and in Croke Park. The impact on our training will be huge. Our season is broken into three-week blocks now and we can go after different things in those blocks. We have three weeks now to the League final, we have three weeks then until the start of the Ulster Championship and then, should we win that, there’ll be three weeks to an Ulster final.”

Few gave Donegal a chance last weekend, but their own belief shone.

The returned Bonner was named as the Player of the Match, the Glenfin woman scoring 1-2 in a superb display.

“Having a player of Yvonne’s calibre to come in to any set-up is a massive lift,” her Glenfin colleague Herron said.

“Especially for the younger players to see a player like that back. It’s a huge bonus and it’s another threat up front. Teams could maybe have doubled up on Geraldine and Karen, but now with Yvonne back in, it’s very hard for teams to split between them all.”

Curran made some big changes to the backroom over the winter months. In came 2012 All-Ireland winner Mark McHugh. Barney Curran joined, too, and the strength and conditioning work is done under the watch of Paul Fisher.

“We put in a massive pre-season,” Herron said.

“We don’t want to take the feet off the gas. We’ll go hard at it again and it’ll be good to get a run out in the League final again.

“It’s a lovely feeling. We knew this would be an absolutely battle - and it always is against the top side in the country. We are absolutely over the moon. It was a hectic couple of minutes, but we’re delighted to get the win.

“It’s probably going on previous games that people wrote us off. There are still negatives and things we did wrong. We don’t want those things to catch us out again.”

Curran is a forensic analyst in how he operates.

The Downings clubman insists that a suggestion that Lady Luck was smiling would be ‘disingenuous’ to his side. That being said, though, he is keen to stress that there is much work to do.

“They were well worked goals,” he said.

“I don’t think we played particularly well and we aren’t overly happy with the display over the 70 minutes.

“We scored two points with a gale-force wind. Dublin apply so much heat on a player-to-player basis and we really struggled to deal with that. They put a stranglehold on you and the game was played on Dublin’s terns. We have to get better in terms of bossing games.

“There is also the fear where a scraping victory papers over some cracks. There is a tendency to do that. If the ball doesn’t go in and you lose by two points, you look at it completely different.”

Dublin have had Donegal’s number for the most part in recent seasons, but the Donegal boss has warned that Dublin could present an entirely different set of questions come the Championship.

“Getting the Dublin money off the back, I don’t look at it like that - it’s hitting the monkey a punch on the face, maybe,” he said.

“Last year, we poked the bear as such in beating Galway in the League and it didn’t do us any good in the Championship. We aren’t getting carried away. Saturday was one game, one day, a completely isolated event. Should we meet them again, we’ll have the same to do - and more.

“Everybody is appreciative of the potential and talent, but too many times we fell on that sword. There’ll be a bounce and has to be a psychological kick out of getting over Dublin in a knockout game.”

Curran hailed the ‘unmerciful shift’ and the ‘sheer will’ of Nicole McLaughlin and Niamh McLaughlin while noting that Roisin Rodgers ‘ran the legs of herself and pointing to the impact of his potent frontline.

“We were dead and buried with ten minutes to go,” Curran said.

“Dublin were picking us off at will, but girls didn’t stop trying. That’s the thing. We can’t put it to any class or quality, but it was guts and effort.”