The Donegal captain seemed lucky to avoid a red card after several high challenges on Kerry defender Dylan Casey during Sunday’s Division One final at Croke Park
Jack O’Connor felt Donegal’s Michael Murphy was fortunate to escape a red card during yesterday’s Division One final win for the Ulster champions at Croke Park.
Kerry, who won the League title last term before beating Donegal in the All-Ireland SFC decider last July, were decidedly second best in a game that failed to match the competitiveness of the three other football deciders over the weekend.
Not that Donegal will care as they cantered to a 13-point success. However, David Gough’s decision to show Murphy a yellow, rather than a red, for a couple of closed fist tackles on Dylan Casey in the first half proved a major talking point.
For O’Connor, he agreed with the assessment that the former Donegal captain ought to have been sent off.
When that point was put to him by a reporter after the game, he replied: “I agree with you, and you have better eyesight than a few other lads that were looking at it, let’s put it like that. Yeah, so what can I say? That’s what happened.”
McGuinness stressed that he didn’t see the incident in question, but he did state that the game had become “very physical” and urged referees to clamp down on so-called “screening” and third-man challenges.
“I didn’t see anything of it, to be honest with you,” McGuinness said of the Murphy incident, before adding: “But the game is very physical out there.
“Going back to the kick-outs, the game is very physical on kick-outs at the moment. There’s an awful lot of blocking going on on kick-outs. There’s an awful lot of physicality going on in kick-outs across all the games.
“There’s an awful lot of screening going on in the attack in third, which I think somebody’s going to get hurt from. I think people are going to people to hand them the ball, and they’re running into people to release people. That’s not in the rule book.
“People are talking in the media. Coaches are talking about screening. Screening is not in the rule book.
That’s a black card. If you intentionally screen somebody, you’re coming across their path. So I think that’s definitely something that probably needs to be stamped out going into the Championship, because I do see a bad head injury coming from that one.
“But to your point, the physicality, it’s heavy around the middle. It really is heavy around the middle.”
While delighted with his side’s performance, McGuinness swiftly turned his attention to an Ulster SFC quarter-final with Down in Letterkenny at the end of April
“From our point of view it’s another game, it’s a great game to get under the belt,” he added.
“It was lovely to get back to Croke Park, get a good game and have a good performance level and we go away now and start preparing for Down in the first round of the Championship.”
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