Pain necessary for Dublin’s development

YOU’D have to go to quite a bit of bother to find something novel about Dublin’s latest big-game defeat.

It most obviously followed last August’s collapse to Cork and was eerily similar to the Mayo episode in 2006, from blowing an eight-point lead early in the second-half, all the way to management bafflingly taking off an in-form forward, this time Diarmuid Connolly getting stuck with the role of “Who? Me?” that Ray Cosgrove was landed with back then.

Throw in the second-half collapses to Kildare in 2000 and Armagh in ’03, the one-point defeat to Joe Kernan’s men in ’02 to go with the aforementioned semi-final exits in ’06 and ’09, and their latest disaster movie seems more like a re-run than a predictable sequel.