Brogan: Dubs sleeping easy

CONTRARY to recent reports, not every Dublin footballer had a problem with spending the night in the Regency Hotel before their Leinster quarter-final against Wexford a fortnight or so ago.

Alan Brogan, for one, slept like a baby.

“There was a lot made out of it, probably more than it was,” he said yesterday at the Suremen Challenge launch.

“It was something the manager wanted to try and it worked for some people and it won’t work for others.

“In some peoples’ houses the night before a big game like Sunday you could have relations over and your Ma and Da asking about the match and that can play on some peoples’ minds.

“The management were just trying to take people out of that environment where there is no outside influence. I know when I lived at home we could have relations up the night before. It can wreck your head a bit if you let it.”

The side’s abject performance for the first 50 minutes of their championship opener the following afternoon was always likely to result in a week of close inspection and, sure enough, no detail was deemed too small.

Brogan has been knocking around the goldfish bowl that is the Dublin panel for eight years and he must have thought he had seen and heard everything in that time. Until now, that is.

With the pillows and mattresses excused blame, that just leaves matters on the pitch to account for when it comes to the post-mortem but Brogan believes there is a lot of ignorance abroad as to what Dublin are trying to do.

The perception is that Pat Gilroy has pulled the reins on Dublin’s flamboyant side and sought to introduce a smothering defensive blanket with 13 men behind the ball and a more counter-attacking thrust.

Joe Kernan’s Armagh and Mickey Harte’s Tyrone are Dublin’s role models but it isn’t like they spent the winter glued to reruns of the 2002 or 2003 All-Ireland finals.

“No, we haven’t. Like, guys are getting hung up on this whole system. It’s literally just a case of trying to get the ball back as quick as we can.”

They haven’t dwelt all that long on the Wexford video nasty but Brogan seems to know where Dublin went wrong and Gilroy has surely come to the same conclusion.

“You talk about Tyrone’s defensive system and Armagh’s defensive system. That’s not what they did,” said Brogan. “They never retreated back into space and marked space. They always tackle the man and try to get the ball back as much as they can and we didn’t do that in the first-half.”

Piggy-in-the-middle was how he described Dublin in that first 45 minutes against Wexford: 15 men marking space and chasing shadows. Not exactly rocket science, as he says himself.

And the positives? Well, he couldn’t remember the last time a Dublin side had won a championship match after being seven points adrift and there were the 70 minutes he got under his belt after an injury-plagued season.

He wasn’t overly impressed with his contribution by the sound of things but it was a start and, in that sense, he will have benefited from the extra-time after coming on after 20 minutes of the first-half for Eamon Fennell.

“I haven’t played a huge amount of games, bits and pieces with the club, in the league and in challenge matches. I’ve gone from injury to injury. It hasn’t been ideal preparation and that bit of time the last day will brought me on. Whether I am up to match sharpness or not, I won’t know until I’m out there and we’ll find out on Sunday.”

Brogan will start if Gilroy is the superstitious type as Dublin haven’t lost to Meath since he came on board.

The head-to-head record since 2002 stands at: played five, won four, drawn one. The only experience he has of losing to his neighbours is a Leinster U21 final in 2001 which, incidentally, was also the year that Meath last defeated the capital side in the senior championship.

Brogan understands that such a run doesn’t last forever. Cyclical was how he put it and there is a definite sense that the time might just be ripe for Meath to regain the upper hand.

“If we play like we did for 45 minutes like we did the last day we will probably find ourselves with too big a mountain to climb so it’s probably lucky that we had the chance to rectify the problems that we had.

“Dublin-Meath are always big games. Meath will fancy their chances. And we will fancy our chances.”