Writing a new Blue Book

AS a breeding ground for champions, a nursing home in north central Dublin is certainly one for the books.

But for the majority of the fit, young and able who entered through its Griffith Avenue gates in the early months of the last two years, the sign might as well have read “Welcome To Hell”.

St Clare’s was no Crusheen; it didn’t have a back-breaking hill but it was still a hurt locker. A House of Pain. And yet on freezing, pitch-black January mornings they fought their way through snowed-in driveways and ungritted roads to get there.

Those 6am training sessions, often followed by evening workouts, sent out a message to the opposition as much as the players that they were getting a head start on the posse (the media appreciated some of that with the 8am press briefings).

Just as a teenage Davy Fitzgerald went out of his way to be seen training by his rival goalkeeper Leo Doyle on his way to work, it was a psychological trigger. It provided Pat Gilroy with the opportunity to knock the bravado out of his players, although some within his management team don’t have fond memories of the place.

“St Clare’s was okay, it wasn’t as good as some people might say,” reckons selector Dr David Hickey. “The yoke we had to train on all winter, especially with a gale there, was very poor. We were following the local women’s team on a B pitch and in awful conditions. I didn’t like it.”

The parallels with Clare don’t stop there. There was a healthy dollop of perceived persecution too, long before Diarmuid Connolly’s semi-final dismissal.

Jim McGuinness’s chokers remark about Dublin in June wasn’t a slight on the team. He was talking about the perception of them in making a point about how Donegal were seen but it suited Dublin to take offence. After crumbling in the league final to Cork, any mention of the ‘C’ word wasn’t going to be taken lightly.

Likewise, there was offence taken in the camp by the amount of hullabaloo made about an incident involving Stephen Cluxton and former Ireland international Jason McAteer in a soccer match in aid of Autism Action in June. “I think the turning point was actually Clucko hitting that gobshite McAteer in Santry,” chuckles Hickey. “The amount of support he got for that was quite incredible. Little things like that throughout the year.”

Cluxton’s charity work is something he takes seriously. As a media circus ensured, the camp rallied around him.

“It was a bit of craic at the time but sometimes little things like that can galvanise a team,” admits Alan Brogan. “Clucko took a bit of stick in the papers for that — not a huge amount, mind — and it wasn’t coverage he would have wanted.”

THANKS to Gilroy, the Monaghan town of Corduff has been christened as the birthplace of the Dublin resurrection in November 2009 but it was just a start. Where the healing germinated.

A number of the players involved in the harrowing 17-point defeat to Kerry three months previous weren’t actually there at that development match.

From speaking to Gilroy afterwards, they were told in no uncertain terms what the others had been told.

“After what happened, Pat knew we couldn’t play like that again and expect to win,” says Brogan. “We had to change the way we played. It went in stages. At the start, we just put everyone behind the ball, a bit like Donegal this year. Then, as the weeks and months went on we developed it a bit.”

But there was plenty of tough love to come as well. Brogan’s brother Bernard got the brunt of it. After coming in at the end of 2009, Hickey — along with Gilroy — made the would-be 2010 footballer of the year a pet project. There were league games he didn’t start, times he was told he was too cocky. But then he wasn’t the only one who got an earful.

“Pat Gilroy deserves great credit for what he has done with the culture of the group,” sats Hickey. “The Dublin team had become second-rate Premiership bulls***, kissing the badge and running to the Hill. Shouting in their opponents’ faces... all this sort of crap. Pat put the boot into them for that and got rid of it. With Mickey (Whelan), he changed the team ethic and all the concepts that go with that.

“(Cork doctor) Con Murphy called me the other day and said what impressed him most about the team was that they were a class act after the match and on TV that night. They were respectful, they were gracious, didn’t bulls*** about Kerry.”

While this was a team who played to a defined formula, there were plenty of eccentricities inside the camp. The unconventional wisdom of Mickey Whelan. The almost unerring calmness of Cluxton who, after kicking the winning free and returning to the dressing room, without even a hint of a smile declared, “Sure we’d have got a replay out of it anyway.”

Stats man Ray Boyne is another character. There since Paul Caffrey’s first year in 2005, he made headlines for an altercation with Monaghan’s Tommy Freeman in a league match three years ago.

But the value of Boyne to the Dublin cause has been significant. For one, every Wednesday he’d join Bernard Brogan to fetch his kicks while helping the other placed ball men like Cluxton and Mossy Quinn at training.

With injured players Paul Griffin and James Brogan as part of his team, he took to one of the Hogan Stand corporate boxes with his trusty iPad where he was mic’d up with the management on the sideline.

On Sunday, they knew Kieran Donaghy was going to take to the left side of midfield at some stage. Okay, Boyne anticipated he wouldn’t come out from full-forward from the outset but there was no panic.

In a empirical business like stats, there is no place for it. “If you become a fan during the game it’s really not for you,” he remarks. “I get a bit of a ribbing off the guys because sometimes they’d ask me what score it is and it might be a fact that I wouldn’t know during the game because it’s not something you’d be tracking. Or what’s left.”

IN the post-match press conference following April’s league final defeat to Cork which saw them lose an eight-point lead, Gilroy, a calm operator, came close to bristling when asked if Dublin had a mental block.

“Do you think I’m going to say yes to that now, in fairness? If I really believed that I should walk out the door now and never be in front of that team again.”

He added: “People will say what you just said and we’ll deal with that — and we have to deal with that because that’s our job because we are the Dublin team and we have to listen to that. And when we have the All-Ireland, some day, we’ll stop hearing that. That’s the challenge because that’s what everyone is going to think.”

After her success with the Tipperary hurlers last year, performance coach Caroline Currid, who had also been working with Dublin last season, became a regular fixture in the camp. A number of the more established players like Brogan didn’t look for her counsel but were wholly aware of her contribution.

“She helped out a lot of the younger guys and it certainly seemed to have worked. It didn’t look like there were too many nerves and nobody froze which was so important in a game like that.”

Without mentioning her, Gilroy gave praise to Currid’s work in his post-match press conference. “Some people who know a lot about the mind have been really helpful.”

From the day after beating Donegal, Gilroy set in train a forensically-detailed itinerary for the following three weeks. The couple of days in the Avon Rí resort in Blessington over the All-Ireland hurling final weekend, which players would speak to the media at the press day 16 days out from the game, the 3.30pm training sessions to put onlookers off the scent... every “i” was dotted and “t” crossed.

With his experience in senior management in Dalkia, this was part of Gilroy’s field of expertise. Players were given detailed schedules of what was ahead of them and told to get familiar with them as possible (Brogan stuck his under a fridge magnet).

The day before the game, they went through the warm-up, which on All-Ireland final day is shorter than usual, as well as the parade and the line-up to meet President Mary McAleese.

“Just to get guys mentally ready,” recalls Brogan. “To be honest, a few of us didn’t know what we were doing lining up on the red carpet. It was new to us. If you can’t practice for it you can be unnerved about it.”

Curbing the hype was the biggest thing. Gilroy had spelt out just how corrosive it was when he was part of the Dublin team that lost to Donegal in the final 19 years ago. Polite refusals were given to all promotional and commercial work, even though it meant passing up tens of thousands of euro in sponsorship.

Nobody broke rank, unlike in 2008 when somebody divulged The Blue Book, but then the team ethos had already been built up earlier in the year when the more established players passed off commercial offers to their student and unemployed team-mates.

“There was a bit of stuff not just for myself, there were a number of fellas who sacrificed stuff,” admits Brogan. “At the end of the day, winning a football match is a lot bigger than any of that stuff and it help to galvanise the team. There were times when seeing Bernard, myself or the other higher profile guys in the paper and that doesn’t always help.”

Gilroy had also spoken to the players about being greedy with their time.

“People probably want their pieces of us but now they can have as much of us as they want,” says Brogan.

A MEMBER of Whelan’s St Vincent’s management team when the club won the 2008 All-Ireland title, DCU professor Niall Moyna had worked with Gilroy before so stepping in as Dublin physical trainer under him later that year was a good fit. But his first job was to enquire about the possibility of setting up camp at St Clare’s in Glasnevin, a grounds owned by the university but run by the Health Service Executive.

Through connections, the process of building a dressing room complex beside the pitches was swiftly completed and Dublin had a new home. For the players, they had a haven where they were able to have cooked meals without having to move elsewhere.

Through Moyna, Dublin were also at a distinct advantage in gaining access to contemporary research before it was published.

He took great pride in seeing 12 DCU past/present students on the panel last Sunday just as much as the strength and conditioning programme. The fact that four of Dublin’s six championship games were won in the last 10 minutes is a testament to the work though he says its importance can be exaggerated. “I hate that teams would think after this year — and a number of counties are looking for people already — that strength and conditioning will get you any further than the last eight. They won’t win you an All-Ireland; you have to have more than that.

“The other thing I would say is strength and conditioning is a long-term plan. You often hear about teams winning an All-Ireland and other teams copying them the next year. But winning the All-Ireland could be a five or six-year experiment.”

A native of Scotstown, Sunday gave Moyna an insight into something he never thought he would be able to obtain.

“I’m from Monaghan and I probably will never have the opportunity to win an All-Ireland. What I experienced on Sunday every classy player who played throughout his career should have the opportunity to do the same.”

So what now? Celebrations, of course, but ones tinged with trepidation. Whelan’s departure as coach yesterday could pave the way for his club-mate Gilroy to stand aside.

As such a young panel with only three aged 30 or over, its membrane is hardly going to disintegrate.

Not now, when their confidence is sky-high.

“Only great teams do back-to-back All-Ireland titles,” states Brogan. “Fellas are going to have to have a serious look at themselves and say ‘Do I really want to go at this?’ If they don’t, it won’t be worth other guys’ time.

“We’ll enjoy the next couple of months but when we come back we’ll have to approach the season like they did this season, take each game at a time because there’s no point worrying about trying to win an All-Ireland in January.”

Try telling that to the managers who are planning to replicate Dublin’s 6am starts in the first month of 2012.