Pain necessary for Dublin’s development
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.
But there was a subtle difference to last Sunday, one which Pat Gilroy not only identified after the match but clearly anticipated before it. He made sure his team stayed and watched Michael Shields collect the cup.
“I think it was very important for us to stand there,” he’d tell reporters afterwards, and he was right. Because for all the agonising and high-profile defeats this generation of Dublin player has had to endure, none were with an actual cup up on the podium.
The last time Dublin lost a Leinster final was in 2001 when no current player was on the panel. A good number were around for the 2008 NFL Division 2 final defeat to Westmeath but that hardly cut them up.
Losing a major national final, however, does, and invariably it’s not until you’ve stood on that field and looked up into that stand and experienced that feeling that those bastards up there have what belongs to you, that you’re compelled to return and grasp it.
This Cork team knows that so close, so far feeling, just as they now know how to win. In 2007 they watched Declan O’Sullivan lift the Sam Maguire above their heads as well as his own.
In 2009 they had to endure Darran O’Sullivan do the same. And it’s those experiences why it’s been Graham Canty and Michael Shields raising cups in the Hogan Stand these last 12 months.
They’re about all that separates this Cork team from Dublin. It was widely touted late last summer that Cork simply had to win the 2010 All-Ireland while Dublin were in what Pat Gilroy termed “bonus territory”, but we dismissed Gilroy’s spin on the basis that his team were at most only a season behind Cork in their development.
In many ways the two counties had been on an almost identical trajectory since 1996. What gave Gilroy more leeway was that just as it had taken Conor Counihan a second season to stamp his mark on the team, it had also taken Gilroy the same time. The only other way his team lagged behind Cork in the development stakes was that they missed out on the experience of an All-Ireland final like Cork sampled in 2007, even though Dublin had been a superior team than Cork that year.
The point is this: Dublin need only look to the team that defeated them last August and last Sunday for consolation and inspiration. Even after winning last year’s league, there were all kinds of doubts over Cork’s mental fortitude when they again lost to Kerry in narrow but familiar circumstances. But they didn’t doubt themselves; instead they accentuated the positives, learned the lessons.
Look at them now. It used to be said that you could only trust the Cork hurlers, never the county’s footballers. Now it’s the hurlers who keep losing by a point and the footballers who keep winning by that margin in Croker.
They’re a remarkably admirable bunch and the Cork public, which can excuse its feeble showing last Sunday on the grounds it was Easter Sunday, should duly atone and pay its proper respect by packing Killarney in July. As Gilroy mentioned last Sunday, there’s a resilience about Dublin too. They’re failing but they’re failing better and higher and all the time learning. They’ll look at Kevin McMenamin as a back-up freetaker, the team’s zonal marking policy, and throwing on a forward that’s been already substituted.
It doesn’t just take a lot to win an All Ireland now. It takes a lot of time. We watched Donegal and Laois last Sunday, two improving teams under two impressive young managers. But it’ll take them three years to get to the level of a Kildare, four or five to get to that of a Dublin and Cork.
The great NBA coach, Pat Riley, once spoke of the Principle of the Perfect Painful Progression, claiming all teams have to go through a torturous evolution filled with heartbreaking defeats before they’re ready to win a championship.
Down last year nearly made a mockery of that thesis but it remains valid; from Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls to Steve Bruce’s Manchester United, from Martin Johnson’s England to Graham Canty’s Cork, winning and progress involves a lot of painful defeats.
Gilroy’s Dublin could follow in that tradition. They’ve followed Cork in everything else.
* Contact: kieranshannon@eircom.net
