Will a different Dublin side deliver?
Dublin shimmy in from the sidelines for their Leinster championship bow against Laois this weekend with Pat Gilroy’s words from the midweek press conference ringing in their ears — “at the end of the day, it is all about results for us”. If this is to herald a new era of an even more conservative Dublin, where the grinding out of marginal victories becomes the norm, then we’ve just heard our hopes of being entertained from here until the end of the Leinster championship fritter away.
It seems the harsh lessons learned during the latter stages of the league final are having a bigger bearing on Dublin’s mindset than they should have. The loose ends from the final fade-out are still there, exposed and raw, but to radically alter the way they play the game would be a drastic overreaction on Dublin’s part.
Dublin got enough right during the league final to suggest that they are following the correct course and the team selected for tomorrow’s game against Laois is as every county would like to have it entering the championship — as strong as it has been at any stage this year.
Of course we might have said the same this time 12 months ago when they entered the arena against Wexford with what appeared to be a decent team whose last competitive outing was a rare six-point hiding of Tyrone in Omagh. All the old doubts resurfaced that day against Wexford, with Dublin hanging on grimly in normal time before eventually winning in extra time.
So much has changed one year on with only seven players from that game being started tomorrow and Dublin now being spoken of as one of a small handful of All-Ireland contenders.
So why all the doubt? And why give ventilation to that doubt after one period of ineptitude in a league game? Three years ago in a league final, Kerry lost a huge lead against Derry but I don’t think it was even once mentioned publicly by players and management on the road to the All-Ireland final. It is probably too much to hope for that Dublin’s faults and failings won’t be a rich quarry for public opinion at this time of the year but Dublin players and management can help by not cross examining themselves in public and by washing their linen in private.
One of the many achievements of Pat Gilroy’s last 12 months in management had been to make this bunch of Dublin players less self-regarding than their predecessors. Gone is the stupid march toward the Hill, the showboating, and hoopla. After their Leinster championship exit last year, Dublin became a hungry fighter with a serious blue collar ethic. They still retained the charisma and the character of previous Dublin teams because of the pace at which they played the game but there was no place for celebrity — an endorsement in itself of Gilroy’s low key approach.
Of all the lessons handed out in their last two defeats to Cork and the esprit d’escalier that those lessons brought about, perhaps the most pertinent to any ambitions Dublin might harbour is the one lesson that you can’t reproduce on the training ground. How do you coach nerve? How do you produce what we like to label ‘leaders’? Much has been made in the debate this week of Dublin’s perceived lack of leadership on-pitch for the final stages of the league final but there is enough raw material there to mould some leaders. This time last year, Cork’s Donncha O’Connor passed up a late chance by ballooning a free-kick into the arms of Kerry’s Mícheál Quirke and thus handing possession and victory to Kerry in the Munster semi-final replay. Charges of bottling and choking were fired out all too readily, yet by the time O’Connor got back to Croke Park later in the summer, he had become one of the genuine leaders of the Cork attack. That metamorphosis came about by using the four games from the tense qualifier against Limerick to last year’s All-Ireland final to reinvent himself from play and from frees. The leadership comes in the doing of deeds and there is no better embodiment of that at the moment than Donncha O’Connor.
If Dublin are to bring forth leaders of men, they are going to have to use games like tomorrow’s as dress rehearsals or habit formers for the rest of the season. It is these rehearsals, habits and deeds that will then make them the team they need to be.
Looking at team selection for the Laois game, it would appear that Gilroy, like many managers, seems to have abandoned the idea of a high-fielding midfielder. Unlike many managers, he can afford to because of Stephen Cluxton’s incredible range of kicks. Donegal frustrated Laois with short kick-outs in the league final. If Laois are to make any inroads they will have to try and force Cluxton to kick it out to Quigley and Begley with the expectation that Peter O’Leary and Darren Strong will make offensive runs coming off their shoulders. Cluxton will know this too and is unlikely to be forced into doing anything he won’t want to do. If they get anywhere near full throttle, it’s hard to see anything other than a Dublin win.
Meanwhile, the Graham Geraghty saga has provided the Meath players with as good a diversion as they’re likely to get all year and assuming it doesn’t affect their performance (which it shouldn’t) I expect them to give Kildare their bellyful of it. I recall a similar furore in Monaghan last year when Seamus McEnaney put his reputation on the line by choosing half-back Darren Hughes to deputise for the injured Shane Duffy in goal in their first round against Armagh. There is a thin line between boldness and daftness but it certainly ups the stakes. Only their final league performance against Tyrone gave us any indication of the real Meath spirit in 2011 but they have enough quality in the half-forward line to trouble Kildare tomorrow and the Lilies will have to be on their game to beat them. Anything less and Meath will win.
Banty’s former charges in Monaghan are a team bereft of some proven championship performers and the primary focus of their latest clash with Tyrone will be the wellbeing or otherwise of the Tyrone veterans. If Dooher, Hughes, McMenamin, Jordan, Gormley, McGuigan and O’Neill show that they still have the stomach and more pertinently, the legs, for a game played at serious pace, they should have too much for Monaghan. The absence of the McMahon brothers from the full-back line will be felt with Finlay and McManus lurking but Tyrone always perform in Ulster. And they have the results to prove it!
