Donegal get sweet revenge

Few words are needed to describe the scene as Saturday night fell on Enniskillen. Donegal had wide smiles and Fermanagh had long faces, and what happened on the field justified their moods.

Donegal's win was surprising only because of the ease with which it came. The two close games between these sides last month were quickly forgotten, and like most trilogies of the Hollywood sort, this third part was a dud.

The mystery then is how form changed so dramatically Manager Mickey Moran has unearthed new confidence in Donegal; his counterpart John Maughan has time to wonder what went wrong for Fermanagh.

"I thought we came out of the blocks very well," said Moran "and I thought Fermanagh looked to be suffering from the effects of losing to Monaghan last week. We could have been a lot more ahead at half time and we missed crucial scores in the second half as well.

Donegal's John Gildea was his influential best at midfield and Brian Roper was covering more ground than anyone. Adrian Sweeney and Brendan Devenney provided most of the scores and so feeble was Fermanagh's resistance that Donegal led 0-9 to no score at the interval. Had their accuracy not let them it would have been more.

Fermanagh did manage a decent response against Monaghan last week but not here. Rory Gallagher has rarely been so anonymous and the only real cheer was for Mark O'Donnell's goal. Unfortunately, that came just before the final whistle.

Yet it wasn't all roses for Donegal. Roper received a red card - ruling him out of the second round along with the already suspended Jim McGuinness. Gildea's future is uncertain; he intends spending the summer in America, but Moran was still thinking positive.

"Well Brian did get caught, and I'm disappointed for him because he was a real spark out there. We will miss him but we've 28 on the panel and we'll regroup and get ready for whoever comes next." John also had a big game but everything is out on the table in this panel and we'll see what happens."

For Maughan, however, the scale of the defeat left him short of words. "It's not really possible to say anything about that," he offered, "and it's just very hard to rationalise it. We played absolutely dreadful and Donegal really could have beaten us by 10 more points. Days like this you just don't feel like being involved with football."

The former Mayo manager came to Fermanagh only for the year, although he wasn't making any immediate plans about the future: "Right now you feel like throwing the football and the boots away, but I have been here before so you get hardened to it. But I have some thinking to do."