By Niall Gartland

PADDY Tally seems to be caught between two stools – whether to stick with his defensive instincts or to get swept along with the attacking revolution that has spread throughout the country.

Down got plenty of men behind the ball in their one-sided defeat to Donegal at the weekend, so it was hardly a ‘to hell with it’ gung-ho approach, but it was a world away from the type of hounding and harrying necessary to limit the concession rate, regardless of the optics.

Former Down footballer Shane Mulholland doesn’t want to be too critical after the fact, but he wonders whether Tally, whose future as Down manager is uncertain, would’ve fared better with a different approach.

“I just wonder whether Paddy was caught between two stools. There’s the way you’d expect his teams to play – that all-out defensive effort that makes a team extremely hard to beat, and the way the game is evolving.

“When he got the job I thought he was definitely the best man at that point in time. I thought he’d make us extremely hard to beat and that we’d develop from that, in the same way that Jimmy McGuinness had a nightmarish gameplan in his first year and he subsquently developed it.

“We don’t have that one-two punch of a Michael Murphy and Colm McFadden, but what we do have is ball carriers like Liam Kerr and Caolan Mooney, so we are able to play a counter-attacking game.

“Paddy probably saw the way the game is going and wanted us to be more open and expansive, but I don’t think we have the tools to do that. It would be better to dig in, and ignore what the Down dignatory thinks. I can guarantee the Down public would be happier if we were at least competitive than playing a style of play that got us blown out of the water.

“I don’t know Paddy personally, but he won a Sigerson Cup with St Mary’s by being really hard to beat and picking off scores on the counter, and I think he should’ve stuck with that.”

Down were beaten by 16 points on their home turf by a classy Donegal outfit, and while they were always likely to lose, they made life difficult for themselves.

They conceded the opposition kick-out, a move which didn’t pay off as Donegal found it easy enough to breach enemy lines, while Down goalkeeper Rory Burn’s restarts were lacking in variety

Mulholland commented: “It’s easy to be an expert after the event, but there has been form here. You ask ‘what are they working on training – is there a kick-out plan?’

“Paddy did the same as when he was at Galway – from our own kick-outs he put four players effectively in a ‘square’ on one side of the pitch and tried to overload it.

“To me that’s your fourth or fifth option, you must have another raft of options that you can use in order to engineer posession.

“I’ve seen commentary over the last couple of days suggesting that it’s better to belt the ball 60 or 70 yards from goals, and Donegal got their goal when Caolan Mooney spilled the ball from a short kick out.

“But you have to have that mix – you can’t just do the same kick out every time. A huge problem for Down is winning primary possession from their own kick-out. Teams press up and squeeze them and they seem to find it very hard to get out of their own half.

“The irony is, that when we get possession we have a raft of ball carriers who can do a job for us. Every Down person you ever talk to harks back to the glory days, but football has evolved and kick-passing is less prevalent. I think we can evolve with it as we have tonnes of pacey ball carriers. On reflection you’d also wonder whether Donegal took their foot off the pedal in the second-half.”

It remains to be seen whether Tally will be back next year as his current three-year contract has expired. Mulholland says the problems go much deeper in Down football.

“You’ve heard the same rumours for years that the best players in Down aren’t playing. Is that true? Well there’s a few Kilcoo lads and a couple of lads out injured, but any management team that comes in is going to eyeball certain players that they like.

“We do seem to have physically small players on the county team and there are bigger, athletic players around. It’s the old adage that a good big one beats a good small one, and you look at the physical difference between us and Donegal.

“I could go deeper into the psyche of Down football – I believe that we really struggle when we go behind in games or when a team really goes at us.

“There’s a mental fortitude that’s required that I’m not sure we have and I’m going back to when I played as well.

“We’re not competing any longer at minor or u-20-21 level either. We’ve had a few false dawns where you hear rumours that we have a good minor team etc but it comes to nothing. There is talk that Conor Laverty’s u-20 team are very strong but they have to go out and prove it. Derry have been in four of the five last minor finals and that builds a pedigree and a pathway to the senior team.

“Going back seven or eight years, Declan Bonner took the Donegal minors, the Donegal u-21s and now the senior team, so he knows all the players and has been able to mould a style of play.

“So there’s a whole host of issues – our current game plan, the type of player we’re picking, our general style of play, and the lack of success we’re having at underage level.”