Dublin must learn to swim in deeper water

FOR most of the last eight years, the rather dismissive perception of Dublin has been that of a big fish in Leinster’s pond but one that shrank to the proportions of a relative minnow when it migrated into the deeper waters of the All-Ireland series.

It is a generalisation that has been bred chiefly on a litany of heavy quarter-final defeats to Kerry in 2004 and 2009 and Tyrone in 2005 and 2009 but their experiences in the last four paint an altogether more sympathetic portrait.

Dublin have featured in three All-Ireland semi-finals in the last eight years and lost the lot by a combined score of just four points. If any team can compare psychological scars with Cork, it is the Dubs.

It started in 2002 against Armagh when Ray Cosgrove’s late free rebounded back off a post but even that has paled into the background next to the trauma of 2006 when they somehow let a six-point lead slip against Mayo.

That the game was instantly declared a classic was of little comfort to Paul Caffrey and his side at the time and, though their loss to Kerry a year later was less memorable, the result was much the same.

“The one that really stands out for us is the Mayo defeat,” says Paul Casey who played every minute of those three games. “We were seven or eight points up and it just shows that semi-finals are never over until they are over.

“If there’s one thing you can take from it, going into the last five, ten minutes hopefully it will be a tight game and we’ll keep going until the very end and come out on the right side of a one or two-point victory.”

David Henry was almost as central to the making of Dublin’s unwanted semi-final trilogy. On the bench that day against Armagh, the current captain partnered Casey in defence for the latter two.

Not surprisingly for someone who has endured so many painful memories around this time of year, Henry struggles to come up with any pertinent lessons this present Dublin team can take from such events.

“Probably a lot of us would have thought ‘this is going to be our chance’. It wasn’t and, at the end of the game, an All-Ireland final to us was a lifetime away but it doesn’t have any bearing on this team. It really doesn’t.

“There’s so many new fellas. If you talk to them about 2002 it wouldn’t mean anything to them. If I was new to the panel and one of the older guys on the team started talking about what happened in 1992 I would have fallen asleep.”

Only five of tomorrow’s starting side have survived from the Mayo defeat and just half a dozen from the Kerry reversal 12 months later.

Even those figures fail to highlight the true measure of change.

Only one of those 2006 veterans - Stephen Cluxton - will start in the same position tomorrow. Ross McConnell has switched from full-back to midfield, Henry and Bryan Cullen have vacated the defence for attacking berths while Alan and Bernard Brogan have switched departments up front.

Rightly or wrongly, the common consensus of Paul Caffrey’s Dublin was that of a side that had taken one too many blows to the head, one that was fatally compromised when it came to the final rounds.

Supporters of that school of thought were given considerable backing by the defeat of Tyrone three weeks ago when a side liberally sprinkled with fresh faces exorcised so many of their county’s demons.

“Yeah, we did,” said Henry. At the beginning of the year you’d always look to the best teams in the country and the three teams that we all would have felt were the teams to match were Tyrone, Cork and Kerry.

“To beat one of them was very satisfying. The last couple of years, while we felt we were going very well coming into the Tyrone and Kerry games in ‘08 and ‘09, they were devastating defeats. It was just so important for us to perform against them.”

The new wave has taken its toll on some of the elder statesmen. Jason Sherlock has been jettisoned entirely from the panel while the likes of Conal Keaney and Casey himself have had to play the waiting game on the bench.

Even Henry has been dropped and taken off early in the second-half in a number of other games but Gilroy’s methods have proven successful thus far and Casey can see echoes of times past in the manager’s methods.

“Now reminds me of 2002 when I first came on the panel. Tommy Lyons came in and five or six of us came into the starting 15 that year. There are a lot of similarities to that year.

“The young players bring a freshness to it and they are all really, really good guys. They are well grounded, level headed fellas.”

One honour still eludes them. All of them.