KEVIN CASSIDY WAS sensationally axed from the Donegal senior football panel last night as trouble flared over the All-Star’s contribution to a recently published book.
Manager Jim McGuinness confirmed yesterday that the Gweedore wing-back would not be rejoining the panel next season but refused to comment further on the matter, the Donegal News reports.
It is understood that McGuinness is deeply unhappy with candid revelations made by Cassidy in This is Our Year, a new book on the county’s Ulster Championship winning season.
Cassidy, 30, was one of nine contributors to the book and spoke openly about the training methods and tactics used by the team, breaching McGuinness’s insistence on a tight-lipped dressing room omerta.
“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, eighty-metre sprints, one hundred-metre sprints, shuttle runs, cones on twenty 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.
Cassidy was also highly criticial of John Joe Doherty, McGuinness’s predecessor as manager, but defended his comments at the book’s launch last weekend.
The wing-back was a key part of Donegal’s charge to the All-Ireland semi-finals, landing a memorable winning score against Kildare in the quarters and winning his second All-Star award for his contribution.
