Donegal have been shockingly knocked out of the Ulster Championship at the very first hurdle.<\/p>\n
Down delivered a stunning performance to hand Donegal a 3-21 to 1-21 defeat, in the first Championship game played at the O’Donnell Park since 1951.<\/p>\n
Two Miceal Rooney goals in the final five minutes for Down were the cherry on top of a fantastic performance from Conor Laverty’s side, who had kept Donegal a step behind for the majority of this contest.<\/p>\n
A Caolan McGonagle goal late in the first half put just one point between the sides at the break, as Donegal shot numerous wides and were mostly second-best.<\/p>\n
Unlike so many times in the past however, Jim McGuinness’ men had no second-half surge as Daniel Guinness’ 42nd minute goal for Down once again put them in the driving seat after Donegal had an all-too-brief lead.<\/p>\n
The result marks the very first defeat for McGuinness in the Ulster Championship since his return to the county in 2023, and will spark countless questions just weeks after the high of Donegal’s comprehensive win over Kerry in the Division 1 Final.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Donegal have been shockingly knocked out of the Ulster Championship at the very first hurdle. Down delivered a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":419687,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-419686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=419686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419686\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/419687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=419686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=419686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=419686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}