After a convincing Dublin win against Donegal in the league on Sunday at Croke Park, Rory Gallagher revealed to Oisin Langan on the Monday Rewind podcast that the real goal for his side lies further down the road this season.
Gallagher admitted that their race was run in the game after Bernard Brogan found the back of the net for Jim Gavin's team, who went on to win by a score of 1-20 to 0-13.
He stated that Dublin "cantered home" after that, but was dismissive of the notion that losing by such a scoreline would have any knock-on effect on confidence in the side.
"It's easy for me to say now when we lost but, at the end of the day, we have never at any stage, and certainly not this year, written down winning the national league as one of our goals. We've always focused on the Ulster Championship. I think it's served us very well in the last couple of years, and that hasn't changed this year.
"Look, we never like to lose," added Gallagher "but we were down here two weeks ago and we felt that we were very close to getting a result that night. But we'll move on and look forward to the Ulster Championship".
The Donegal manager also noted that "we have taken what we would call a relaxed, liberal approach to the league this year. We got off to a great start, we won a number of games and that left us safe, but we'll look forward to getting down to a lot of hard work now and we feel we'll improve with that".
Speaking about the role of Paul Durcan in the setup, Gallagher was giving very little away, highlighting that it was up to the 'keeper to let them know.
Image: ©INPHO/Cathal Noonan
"Paul is out in Qatar, as everybody knows, and he was flying in and out. It's not a runner to fly in and out for inter-county football, so while it worked out very well fort Ballyboden, he's just weighing up to see is it possible for him to come back.
"As soon as Paul knows, we'll know," he added, "but at the minute we just move on. We're very comfortable that we've got two keepers who have shared eight league games between them."
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