Donegal skipper Michael Murphy has described their Championship exit as “gut-wrenching”.
The Ulster champions lost their first game of the campaign in Castlebar last Saturday night but it was enough to see Mayo leapfrog them and reach the All-Ireland semi-final.
Murphy said: “Your whole year goes into it like. Your whole belief around it, no matter what people are saying or thinking and no matter how many injuries we did have I did think we were on to something this year, just the level of consistency I thought we were playing.
“Yes, we weren’t playing absolutely brilliantly but I thought we were hitting level of consistency that we hadn’t hit last year and that was the difference for us.
“To not be able to hit anywhere near that against Mayo at the weekend was the gut-wrenching thing because you know if we had done so things could have been different.
“Shoulda, woulda, coulda and all that but, aye, it’s gut-wrenching.”
Murphy is “very hopeful” that long-serving pair Neil McGee and Frank McGlynn will be back in 2020 though.
He added: “Frank has a young family and that kind of thing. Himself and Neil, there’d be no two guys more gutted than the two of them.
“With injuries they never really got a run at it at the business end of the year for us and I know the two of them being as competitive as they are, they’ll want to come back and give it another go and exhaust the possibility of getting back and getting fit again and getting over the injuries.”
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