By Michael Devlin

Donegal captain Michael Murphy hopes to see Stephen Rochford remain in the Tír Chonaill setup for 2020.

While defeat to Rochford’s native Mayo on Saturday evening ended Donegal’s season, this year brought a Division Two title and retention of the Ulster Championship crown, and Murphy wants the former Mayo boss to help continue that good work going forward.

“We'd be very hopeful as a group of players, we definitely want him [to stay]. He's been a brilliant addition along with Karl [Lacey] and Declan [Bonner] and Gary Boyle. 

“He's top class. He's responded well to the whole group and the group, by and large, have responded well to him too. He just challenges everybody and pushed buttons. It comes from that outside type of thing which has been positive. We'd be hopeful but we know the commitment is massive for him. You'd still want him involved next year without a doubt.”

Murphy also believes the more experienced members of the panel, namely Frank McGlynn and Neil McGee, who are perhaps considering taking leave of the inter-county scene, will go back to the well for another year.

“Everyone speaks about Frank and Neil as two of the older statesmen but they're still relatively fresh. The two boys were disappointed to pick up the injuries that they picked up this year and not to be able to contribute to the same degree that they wanted at the ‘Super 8’ stage.

“I know that within the dressing room they are two huge figures. They have younger souls at heart and are able to respond - they know the chat and the lingo with the younger lads. They're still huge part of the whole thing. I'd be hopeful that they'd be mad hungry to get back again next and give it another lash.”

The Glenswilly man was in Dublin this morning to the collect the PWC GPA/GAA Player of the Month award for his peerless performances in July, but with that defeat to Mayo and the cessation of Donegal’s campaign still just four days old, the pain was still raw.

“Ah, not getting any better at it as the years go on,” ruminates Murphy when asked about how he deals with defeat. “I suppose you feel sorry for yourself for a few days anyway and then you start getting no sympathy so you start getting back into things. Ah, you just have to get up and get on with it.

“Listen, you'd be thinking about it every day and thinking about the way you performed and individually. The game goes through your head on repeat, but you just have to get back and get on with it, try and get back to club football as best as you can. Get out there and get your next game under your belt.”

It was a typically efficacious answer from one of the game’s most efficacious player. Ask anyone what is Michael Murphy’s key trait, they’ll surely tell you leadership. Skipper of Donegal’s 2012 All-Ireland winning team aged just 23, it’s hard to believe he just turned 30 on Sunday.

On countless occasions, he has stood up when the chips were down and produced whatever was needed to get Donegal over the line. Try as he might, Donegal came up short on Saturday night in Castlebar however, with Murphy citing the defeat as a failure to recreate the type of performance that yielded two trophies in 2019.

“We thought we had the level of consistency that was missing the previous year with our performances this year. To not have that level of consistency or keep that level going for the Mayo game was just the really, really disappointing thing.

“Even with the injuries that we had coming into the game, we still felt confident due to the fact that we had proven a level of consistency throughout the year. Ah yeah, it's gut-wrenching for everyone to finish in the way we did and to just not to perform to the level that we could.”

“Any game you go out and play, you try and stop the opposition but then they go on and play their own stuff and play their own football too and their footballing ability was evident there. It was a tricky day, weather wise, and your execution had to be right bang on the money and there’s was more on the money than ours. Yes, they had a few mistakes, likewise we tried to stop them as best we could too, and we did it for periods, but not for long enough or not often enough."

Reflecting on the season, Murphy revisits the word ‘consistency’ several times. “Last year maybe our form wasn’t at that level week in week out, day in day out. We thought this year coming off midway through the National League, through Ulster, through a good part of the ‘Super 8s’, it was starting to get to a level that we thought we needed to get to in order to get a certain amount of belief within the squad. That has been a positive all year apart from the big blotch that was the Mayo game.

“A lot of younger players are a year farther down the line, we’ve even introduced one or two even younger players again Oisin Gallen has been there, Odhran McFadden Ferry, it’s been really, really good to see them make contributions in their first year, it’s phenomenal for them at that level. That has been a plus for us. I do believe we are a small bit better improved.”

The fact remains though, that for the second year in a row, Donegal were unable to prevail in a winner-takes-all scenario and get into an All-Ireland semi-final. Last year it was against Tyrone up in Ballybofey in the third game of the quarter-final group that they met their demise, and this time around it was Mayo.

Both they and the Red Hands will contest for a place in the All-Ireland final this weekend, despite incurring two losses so far this year. Donegal meanwhile are gone having only been defeated once, but Murphy is not bitter about that stat, instead insistent that his team need to learn how to win when it matters in order to make that further step.

“Unfortunately it is two big games at two big times of the year that we’ve lost two years in a row. That’ll be the target next year, to navigate your way through Ulster, or a back door, to get ourselves in a similar scenario and try and overcome that obstacle.

“Going back to that level of consistency that we were hitting throughout this year, there was a realistic target there of getting through to an All-Ireland semi, and God knows where else after that. I thought it was a realistic ambition after that. You have to set that again for next year, but there’s a hell of a lot of footballing ground to make before you get to those stages next year.

“It’s important to the team that we set those bars and keep everybody hungry.”