DONEGAL showed a killer instinct in their win over Mayo to knock the Westerners out of the All-Ireland series and earn a home preliminary round quarter-final and manager Jim McGuinness was delighted with his sides win.

A late Fergal Boland scored looked to have secured a share of the spoils for Mayo, but, following the sound of the hooter, Donegal had the final say and Ciaran Moore swung over the game winning point.

There was the chance, pre-game, that Donegal could have slipped out of the competition had they lost to Mayo and Cavan upset the odds against Tyrone, but a win would guarantee McGuinness’ side at least a preliminary quarter-final.

“We spoke in the hotel this morning about the fact that we were just going to go and we were going to play and we were going to try and win the game and that’s what we did. We stuck to the plan if you like and that was very important,” said McGuinness.

“Ciaran had no context of what was happening I suppose in terms of the groups but we said we wanted to try and win this game and that was the number one thing, we had to try and win this game. We didn’t know what was going to happen in the other one.

“We have another game next weekend and we’ll get ready for that. From our point of view, there’s a couple of phases here and that’s the first hurdle. We’re delighted that in those clutch moments, we were able to hold our heads and get over the line.”

On the game itself, McGuinness was happy with how his men “managed” and “controlled” possession for long periods of the contest. They always had Mayo at arm’s length until David McBrien’s goal almost turned the tide.

“I felt that we managed the ball and controlled the ball really well for long periods,” he added. “We got caught in a couple of tackles but bar a couple of those tackles, I thought they really managed and controlled the game in terms of our build up play and established attacks.

“Mayo are a brilliant team and they’re a hard, hard team to beat and it was always going to be like that but the bottom line is that every single day you go out, you’re going to be ahead, you’re going to be level and you’re going to be behind.

“That’s going to repeat and repeat and repeat so it’s just really important not to get too disappointed or down when you’re not leading and it’s also very important not to get too high whenever you’re doing well.”