Brolly reckons Donegal still the team to beat

Joe Brolly doesn’t do small talk and his prediction that Dublin are well capable of wilting come the summer and Donegal are still the team to beat are unlikely to go unnoticed.

Speaking in Croke Park at the launch of the Opt For Life golf challenge the former All-Ireland winner made the short wait for the championship feel even shorter.

“Dublin are there or thereabouts,” said Brolly. “The big question mark over the Dubs is, and I thought you could feel it certainly on Sunday, is Tyrone are no mean team, but they’re very, very defensive, and they’re not good at getting scores. You would have expected the Dubs to win by more, if they were really where they need to be. And they didn’t do that.

“And also, I felt that a lack of confidence started to spread through the team as the game went on. (Bernard) Brogan was taken off. Dean Rock’s two points came out of the blue at a time when it really looked as though Tyrone were more solid, more composed.

“So the big question mark is, are the Dubs going to wilt? Are the Dubs going to be able to stay the distance? Because they looked, to me, like a team that are well capable of wilting under severe pressure.

“It depends who gets through. I mean, they might be lucky, Donegal might not get through.”

That, presumably, means Tyrone will need a bit of luck to beat Donegal – that epic Ulster quarter-final in Ballybofey only three weeks from this Sunday.

Brolly believes Donegal will take considerable beating, despite the pressure on manager Jim McGuinness of trying to win back-to-back All-Irelands.

"I asked Jim this at the weekend, how do you deal with this sort of orthodox belief that has grown up that you can't put All-Irelands back-to-back in football any more? How do you deal with that psychologically with the squad?

Preparing
And he says: 'Well, you don't deal with it at all, we're just preparing for the Tyrone game. Nobody has ever mentioned winning a second All-Ireland, you can't project into the future, so all our concentration is on Tyrone'.

“And when he tells you it, you believe it. He’s immensely charismatic, an unbelievably interesting fella, and that’s going to be very important this year.

What is certain, Brolly added, whoever wins between Donegal and Tyrone will win Ulster. “Those two teams are the two teams in Ulster that can control the tempo of a game, control what happens in a game. There’s no other Ulster team that’s able to do that. So I think they’re in a totally different plane than any of the other teams, and any talk of Monaghan or Derry is fanciful.”

Speaking about Opt For Life, one of the main charities to benefit from the annual GAA golf challenge, set for Waterford Castle Golf Club this September, again Brolly didn’t thread lightly: the campaign aims to make organ donation “an opt out system” in Ireland, similar to most other European countries.

“The thing about the Opt For Life is it makes perfect sense. In the future you wouldn’t need to have a donor card. Some 95 per cent of people think that organ donation is a great thing but only 25/26 per cent have a donor card so in future we wouldn’t need a donor card. We’d all start off as donors.

“So, if you decided for some reason you didn’t want to be a donor you would opt out. Even if you didn’t opt out, under this new system family consent is always critical.

“So without your family consenting at the hospital, God forbid if you were on a ventilator, the donation wouldn’t go ahead.

“But if someone came up to you and said, ‘do you fancy saving eight people’s lives, you don’t have to do anything, you’ll be there dead, on a ventilator, what do you think?’ ”