GAA:Kevin Cassidy is standing over his appraisal of the Jim McGuinness regime that led to his expulsion from the Donegal county panel. The 30-year-old was told he was surplus to requirements by McGuinness earlier this week following comments he made in the book This Is Our Year.
But the Gaoth Dobhair club man, who was only persuaded to come back into the panel by McGuinness at the start of last season before going on to win an All-Star as Donegal reached the All-Ireland semi-finals, feels no confidences were broken in the book.
"It was with total honesty that I approached it and I don't believe I revealed any secrets within the squad," he said today in a statement released to the weekly GAA newspaper Gaelic Life."Anything that I discussed had been said before the publication.
“Our achievements this year were incredible and the times we shared will stay with me forever. It was an incredible time to be a Donegal player. At the end of the season there was a sense of unfinished business, but due to present circumstances it will remain as that for me.”
It is believed McGuinness is upset that he had no consultation from the player prior to the writing of the book, in which the Glenties man’s rigorous training methods are laid bare.
“Jim’s warm-ups are unbelievable,” Cassidy said in the book. “You feel like dying in the middle of them. We might have warmed up with the ball for half an hour. Then we go into springs, 80-metre sprints, 100-metre sprints, shuttle runs, cones on 20 yards either side of you and you have to sprint to the cones and back again.
“You have four men in a line, and if there is any more than a second or two seconds of a difference between the four men, you go again. There is no slacking off, there is no way out. It’s the hardest I’ve ever trained in my life.”