Column: Oisin McConville on Football

In the three weeks he had to think about this All-Ireland Final, Éamonn Fitzmaurice obviously reached the conclusion that if he could target Donegal's strengths rather than exploit their weaknesses, Kerry would have an excellent chance of winning the All-Ireland. That's how it worked out.

It's similar to what Donegal have done over the last four years under Jim McGuinness. Target the opposition's main strengths and tactics first, and focus on the rest once that's done.

The first thing Kerry targeted was Paul Durcan's kick-outs in order to win the ball as much as they could. They pushed up on his kick-outs all game and they double-teamed Neil Gallagher. David Moran and Gallagher were beside each other throughout, but Johnny Buckley kept coming in between them, troubleshooting. I thought he was exceptional in the game. He won a lot of ball and he looked comfortable in possession. In short, he just looks like a Kerry footballer. He's a smart player and he really disrupted Donegal.

But anyway, Kerry got on top of the Donegal kick-outs and they rattled Durcan. The second Kerry goal was unfortunate on Durcan though. I think he slipped and the sun got in his eyes a bit. These things can happen. Perhaps the way Kerry had targeted the kick-outs had gotten into his head at that stage but I believe it was just one of those things that can happen any day. Bad luck.

The second main thing Fitzmaurice targeted was Michael Murphy. The undisputed Donegal talisman, everyone expected him to be a huge factor in Sunday's game. But Aidan O'Mahony was given the job to mark him and he did it superbly well. I felt before the game that O'Mahony would be able to cope with Murphy's physically, even though Murphy is extremely strong. However, I thought that when the game broke down a little bit that O'Mahony might drift off and start giving Murphy space and that when the ball came to the ground that Murphy would be able to beat him to it, things like that. But that's not how it played out at all.

There were stages in the second half when I started to think: it's Murphy time. Like when he got that great score after the break to put Donegal ahead. But O'Mahony stuck to his task. He wasn't overly aggressive but he just annoyed Murphy. He stuck to him and he rattled him. Murphy still kicked four good points but if you had said to Kerry before the game that Murphy would score three frees and a point from play, they would have taken that. Even when he was played close to the goal, especially in the second half, he wasn't really a factor in the game and that's a credit to O'Mahony (five All-Ireland medals now!) and the rest of the Kerry defence.

All six Kerry defenders played well. Paul Murphy had a great game. Killian Young played well, O'Mahony obviously, Marc Ó Sé played really well, Fionn Fitzgerald did a good job and Peter Crowley was excellent. Crowley had to play effectively as a sweeper, because Donegal were kicking the ball in a lot as they weren't getting their runners forward. It takes a smart player to do this job well, and Crowley did it extremely well, mopping up in front of Colm McFadden all day.

Up front, Kieran Donaghy obviously had a huge impact on the game. A lot came off him, he scored 1-2 from play and all three of the scores were excellent, especially the very clever fisted point in the second half and the goal, which he took extremely well in a high pressure situation. It's amazing how he came from nowhere to basically rescue Kerry in this year's championship. He ultimately got them over the line and no-one called that this year.

As for James O'Donoghue, he didn't score but I want to give him serious credit for the maturity and ethic he showed against Donegal. I know what it's like when you're a corner forward and you don't score. It's so frustrating and it was a tough day for him but he kept working away. He had to play out the field and do whatever he could in difficult circumstances to help his team. He kept running and tackling and showing for ball. He played two absolutely brilliant balls into the full-forward line, one for Paul Geaney's goal chance in the first half which a point came off, and one for Barry John Keane in the second half which led to a pointed free. He got on the ball a lot and he is without a doubt my choice for Player of the Year.

However, you'd have to say from Donegal's perspective that Neil McGee did an excellent job on O'Donoghue overall and I think he comes out of the game with a lot of credit as well. When I look at Donegal as a whole and what they possibly got wrong or right - it's easy in hindsight for me to say it - but I believe Patrick McBrearty should always start. It wasn't a day for Darach O'Connor. I thought McGuinness was likely to do something like that - throw someone unexpected in to mess up Kerry's plans - but it turned out not to be a day for small men, for whatever reason.

You could also argue that Christy Toye might have started but in saying that, I don't see who would have been left off in his place. Rory Kavanagh? Ryan McHugh? Odhrán Mac Niallais? You're hardly going to leave any of them off. So to be honest, the more I think about it, the more I think that Donegal got very little wrong tactically. The McBrearty-O'Connor call can be argued but beyond that, there's not much. One of the most persistent criticisms of Donegal's tactics has been their use of Michael Murphy - as in that they play him too far from goals - but he played close to goal for most of the second half and yet that still didn't make a difference.

The tendency afterwards is naturally to say that Kerry and Fitzmaurice won the tactical battle. And while I think they just about did, Donegal still only lost the game by three points. They hit the post at the end and if you take Durcan's slip out of it for Donaghy's goal, does that mean we might have had a draw or even a Donegal win? Who knows? It's a game of inches, after all.

Yet there is something else at play here. If both sides set up more or less the same way (which they did on Sunday) and if broadly speaking, neither gets too much wrong tactically (which was also the case on Sunday) what wins the game? Those old chestnuts of hunger and desire have a lot to do with it.

People laugh about hunger and they say "Hunger and desire don't come into it when you get to an All-Ireland final, everyone has hunger then." But that's total nonsense. Unless you have the insatiable hunger that the opposition have, you will lose, barring a big difference in quality. If you match a similar side in terms of hunger, then tactics and the other little nuances will come into play. But if you don't match them for hunger, you won't win.

After the game, Jim McGuinness said Donegal were flat and that was effectively the reason why they lost the game. They just didn't have the same hunger they had in the semi-final against Dublin, and Dublin didn't have the same hunger this year that they had last year when they beat everyone in sight. That's why they aren't looking at their reflections in the Sam Maguire today.

Kerry had the hunger. It was just in that group this year. Fitzmaurice said after the game that the players were driving a lot of things themselves this year and I sometimes think people don't realise how important that is within a team. I was sitting beside the soccer manager Michael O'Neill at Croke Park on Sunday and with 10 minutes to go I turned to him and asked: "What can a manager do at this stage of the game to really make a difference?" He said you could change the personnel involved but you can't change a player's attitude or his frame of mind. You might be able to do that in the build-up to a game, but with 10 minutes to go, it's long since out of your hands.

There is such a thing as good in-game management - a substitution, a positional switch - but that's it. The rest is up to the players. You can shout in from the sideline as much as you like, but if your players aren't in the same frame of mind as the opposition in terms of hunger and desire, you're fighting a losing battle. In a nutshell, Kerry had more than Donegal on Sunday and that's the main reason they won the game.

We're obviously all experts in hindsight, so before I finish, I want to go back to where my mind was at the start of the season. I thought Mayo would win the All-Ireland. Remembering my own experience with Armagh, when we knocked on the door for four seasons before we finally got there, I thought this was Mayo's time. They have a very good team and I thought they would pip Dublin to the title this year. I just didn't see Dublin having the capacity or the heart to retain the All-Ireland.

I was wrong about Mayo, right about Dublin. I expected them to beat Donegal before that semi-final but I just thought something would go wrong with them before the year was out and sure enough it did.

Kerry? I thought they had a good chance of getting out of Munster but that the best they could hope for beyond that was a place in the All-Ireland semi-final. I never saw them winning it. I saw glimpses of quality from them in the early part of the year, such as when they destroyed Tyrone in the league, but they just didn't look physical enough to really compete. They reminded me of a group of kittens going out and trying to make their way in the world. They were cuddly and new but it was a while before we would see their claws. But hands up, I got that wrong.

As for Donegal, I thought they might have a decent year but I didn't see them reaching the final either. I said midway through the season that I didn't see a team from Ulster winning the All-Ireland title for five years, so not until 2019 at least. I'm sticking with that, and that's one year gone. I just don't think any team in the province has the quality at the minute to really challenge the top three of Kerry, Dublin and Mayo. Donegal do but there is a lot of speculation that this could be the end of Jim McGuinness's time with Donegal and if it is, I think they will struggle without him.

So here's to Jim. He has been a huge plus for the GAA and he has got people thinking outside the box. I didn't really enjoy the game on Sunday from a football point of view, but from a manager's point of view, all you care about is finding a way to win the game, and he has done that more times than not in his career. From his 24 championship games in charge of Donegal he was won 20 and lost four. That's some record. Like Kevin Heffernan, Mick O'Dywer or Seán Boylan, he will transcend his own era and I believe this era will go down in history as the Jim McGuinness era. Perhaps the next era to toast will be the Éamonn Fitzmaurice era.

Looking ahead, I actually think we have now arrived at a very interesting place in Gaelic football. Over the last 15 years, different counties made big strides with their strength and conditioning and that gave them the edge for a while. We had our time in Armagh, Tyrone had their time and Donegal did too. But now I believe it has all evened out. And in that respect, the more you talk about how much Gaelic football has changed, the more you realise it has stayed the same.

Michael O'Neill made another good point to me at the game. He said that at his level - the professional level - he feels that strength and conditioning is the player's job. He expects players coming to him and saying "this is as good as I can be, now let me show what I can do as a player." And that's what he picks his team on. He expects the level of fitness to be the same with everyone, so after that it comes down to the football.

Gaelic football is reaching that point. After a period of flux - two decades where a lot of new champions came on the scene such as Down, Derry, Armagh, Tyrone and Donegal - look who the last two All-Ireland champions are and who the top two in the country are again. Kerry and Dublin. The two great traditional powers of Gaelic football have risen back to the top and I believe that's a big sign that football is not getting as far away from its heart and soul as some people would have you believe.

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Oisín McConville's exclusive football columns have featured on GAA.ie throughout the summer. The opinions expressed in this column are personal and are not necessarily those of the Association. Click here to read earlier columns from Oisín and from our hurling analyst, Brendan Cummins.