McGuinness expecting feisty league match

DONEGAL boss Jim McGuinness is expecting another great battle in MacCumhaill Park when All-Ireland champions Armagh come to Ballybofey on Sunday.

Donegal have had a superb start to the Division One campaign with two wins from two against Dublin and Kerry as Jim McGuinness was delighted to get early points on the board and give the side more breathing space.

And with their next two games against the All-Ireland finalists, McGuinness expects another big battle with the side they beat on penalties in last year’s Ulster final, as well as defeating by a point in the Division 2 final.

“There’s nothing I can tell you about Armagh that you all don’t already know.

“Between Donegal and Armagh, the place will be packed and half of it will be orange and half will be Donegal and it’ll be feisty as usual and a fantastic game for us.

“It’s great to have it as a home game, you have the All-Ireland champions coming to Ballybofey and we had Dublin there the last week and down in Killarney, it was very well sign posted what Division 1 was going to look like this year and it is playing out that way.

“We have to first of all find out a way to recover them and then look forward to that game and see what we can get out of it.”

With the heavy schedule at the moment after their opening league game against the Kingdom being postponed and being moved to the free week of last weekend, it now means that Donegal will play five weeks on the bounce.

The panel is something that will be expected to be used more frequently in the upcoming weeks and one eye-catching name on the subs bench in the opening two games has been Jonny Carlin.

The Red Hugh’s man was part of the Wicklow senior panel last year and helped his club Barndarrig win the Wicklow Intermediate Championship in 2023 before moving back home.

And McGuinness, pictured left, feels that he’s one of many players around the county that can strengthen the panel.

“He’s a Donegal man and he played for Red Hugh’s and he’s back home living here,” McGuinness added.

“He did really well a couple of years ago in the Ulster Club and that’s where he would have come to light initially.

“But we cast the net really wide this year in the hope that we would find a couple of players and we have brought a few in.

“We have a development squad there as well and we looked at about 65 players in the view of trying to find one or two, Ciarán Moore was that player last year and he was a player that wasn’t going to go to the trial and one of his friends convinced him to go and the rest is history as they say.

“In my opinion there are good players in every club and when I went in initially to Donegal a big thing was Inishowen and thankfully now you see the fruits of Ryan Bradley and Paul McGonigle’s legacy.

“You have three players (Caolan McGonagle, Caolan McColgan and Conor O’Donnell) in that now playing in central positions and they are very important for Donegal moving forward.

“We had an Inishowen team in an All-Ireland final so all of that is very important and we have to look everywhere.”