Jim McGuinness found events at Croke Park over August Bank Holiday weekend "genuinely disturbing".

The drubbings witnessed on one of the biggest weekends in the gaelic football calendar have set alarm bells ringing and the former Donegal manager says the GAA faces a fight to save the game:

"I found what happened in Croke Park this weekend to be eerie and genuinely disturbing. It made me fear for the game. The gap between the elite counties and the rest is becoming a chasm. That is blatantly obvious now, and the GAA has to address this issue urgently," he writes in The Irish Times.

"This was the August Bank Holiday weekend: notionally the banner weekend for the All-Ireland football championship. And to say it was an anti-climax would be an understatement. At one stage on Saturday evening, Tyrone led Sligo by 0-20 to 0-10. That is a huge margin in a championship game. What struck me was that Niall Carew, the Sligo manager, said afterwards that at least the team was competitive, unlike in the Connacht final. And it was a comparatively fair point. But it is odd to think that a 10-point gap is now construed as competitive."

McGuinness was spooked by the manner in which Fermanagh's players and supporters openly celebrated their defeat to Dublin: "They were 10 points down with 15 minutes go to and you would think they were the team winning. They were jumping up and down in the stands and the team was applauded off the field.

"And on the surface there was a moral victory there for Fermanagh people to celebrate. But it made me wonder about the level that most teams are aspiring to now. I stayed in the stadium after Dublin had left and I was looking down at the pitch and the Fermanagh boys came back out and they were hugging their family and friends and the scene was one of joy. And that spooked me because they had been well beaten in an All-Ireland quarter-final. And Fermanagh are a well-organised team with an All-Ireland winning manager on the sideline."

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