It’s time to reconsider the possibility of two Dublins
Only at this point there’s nothing funny about it. Instead, as Colm O’Rourke reminded people last weekend, there’s something very sensible about it. Or splitting Dublin into three or four, for that matter. Why should over a quarter of the country’s population only provide 3% of its inter-county football teams?
For sure there’ll be Dublin fans who’ll take umbrage at the very suggestion, but really, Dublin GAA should take it as the ultimate compliment.
To return to an analogy and anecdote this column has written before. A few years back, Mike Forde, the then director of football operations at Chelsea, met Billy Beane of Moneyball and Oakland A’s fame. In the conversation, Beane referred to a competitor as “the worst evil”. Forde asked what he meant by that term. Beane explained that in nearly all cases a sports
organisation has either intelligence or money, if it has either of them at all. Hardly any organisation has both. But this rival did.
And that’s what Dublin GAA, or at least Dublin football, has now. That brilliant, almost unbeatable combination of when resources meets resourcefulness.
The latter part of the equation cannot be ignored. After the demolition of Tyrone, some observers pointed to the contribution of Mark Ingle, the basketball coach whom Jim Gavin and members of his coaching team have consulted at various times since the 2014 defeat to Donegal. Immediately the retort went that it was fine for Dublin, being able to afford to bring in a coach from another discipline. But Ingle isn’t on any payroll. He isn’t even a regular presence in the setup. Gavin just had the brains and the initiative to pick the brains of one of the best hoops coaches in his own county. What’s stopping any other county or county management from calling up the nearest top basketball coach around and doing much the same?
Nearly all of Gavin’s backroom are volunteers. Gavin himself is a volunteer. In Dublin there’s a brilliant coaching culture and structure inside and outside the county panels and it’s primarily driven by a sense of service to a cause greater than themselves. To Dublin, the GAA, and the game itself, especially its skills.
That’s why themselves and Mayo are contesting yet another All-Ireland final: No other two sets of players in football emphasise and work on the skills of the game more than those who’ll follow Stephen Cluxton and Cillian O’Connor around in the parade on September 17. But in Dublin it’s particularly pronounced throughout the entire footballing culture. Where once the
wider Dublin football public rejected the ethos and vision of Mickey Whelan, they now swear and live by it. And again, Whelan doesn’t make a cent from the game.
But the other part of the equation can no longer be ignored either. As well as being incredibly resourceful, Dublin have incredible resources. It is to their credit that they maximise those finances when most other counties would squander them, but that’s another issue.
Much of the development grants that were ploughed in to Dublin from central level were as a consequence of the 2002 Strategic Review commissioned by former president Sean McCague. “For too long,” it reported, “the rest of the country has viewed Dublin’s problems from a distance, as if they had no relevance to the other county units in the Association. That view has to change: Dublin’s importance to the GAA nationally is such that the entire Association must take some ‘ownership’ of the resolution of Dublin’s problems. It is not enough to leave this country’s problems to be sorted out internally.”
So successful has that intervention been that 15 years on you could read that paragraph again and replace Dublin’s “problems” with “dominance”.
The GAA could do with another Strategic Review anyway. Right now, for all its good work, it has been laissez-faire on too many pivotal issues, from something so obvious and as fundamental as the plight of the club player to matters that are now not even on the agenda, like the slow, quiet death of Ulster hurling even though it occurred on the beat of a president and director general from the same province. Do they ever again want to see 15 hurlers from Ulster play in an All-Ireland senior quarter-final? Are they just happy to see the same county win the next 13 Leinster football championships like they have all but one of the last 13?
The Strategic Review was written at a time when Dublin had gone six seasons without winning Leinster and there were concerns, as the report stated, about the “competitive pressures” the county was subjected to compared to others. But what about the competitive forces those other counties are up against now?
here is nothing cyclical about Dublin’s current supremacy. They won’t win every All-Ireland over the next five years — they may well not even win this year’s, such is Mayo’s resolve to get their hands on that cup finally — but it would be a surprise if they didn’t contest at least seven of the next ten finals.
It’s not enough to just say, sure Kerry enjoyed similar prominence in the past and there was no intervention made then. Kerry isn’t home to a quarter of the country’s population. And there was an intervention made 15 years ago to give Dublin a leg up. It was only right that Dublin got more development funding than everyone else. It is still right that Dublin get more development funding than everyone else — one in four people in this country live there. But not multiple times more per capita. And not having them all feeding the one senior team.
It was that same Strategic Review of 2002 that first floated the idea of splitting Dublin into two. At the time, no one was ready for that, especially Dublin, who thought it would destroy any chance of Sam Maguire returning by the Liffey. As it turned out, that report is the reason why Dublin is now basically home to Sam and not just a fourth of the population. It enabled them to get their act together.
Now they have their act together. Now they are the worst evil. And the better they continue to get, the more reasonable that radical suggestion of the old report sounds.
It might take another five or ten All-Irelands for the GAA to act but there’ll come a time when Dublin will have more than one team in the championship.
And very possibly two teams in an All-Ireland final.
