Daly’s capital gains
First off, which county from outside the usual (distressingly if predictably short) list of runners and riders is likeliest to make a championship breakthrough over the course of the next five years? Secondly, which county could be topping Division One by teatime tomorrow if they win at Wexford Park and results elsewhere go their way?
Dublin and Dublin.
Dublin can claim the latter should Cork and Kilkenny fail to win at Fraher Field and Pearse Stadium respectively, both of which are reasonable possibilities, and should Anthony Daly’s side see off Wexford, which is far more than a reasonable possibility on current form. And Dublin as the answer to the first question too because if any outsider is to make waves in the near future, they’re the leading candidates.
Which isn’t to assert, obviously, that even one of the All-Irelands between now and, say, 2016 will be won by anybody other than Tipperary, Kilkenny, Galway, Waterford or Cork. But if one is to be, then Dublin stand as good a chance as Clare or Limerick do. Disagree? Then ask yourself this: is the prospect of Dublin lifting the Liam MacCarthy Cup in the near future any more improbable than the notion of Clare, who’d lost the previous two Munster finals by an aggregate of 27 points, winning the All-Ireland was this time 16 years ago? Scarcely (“Ah, but Clare had Jamesie and Seanie McMahon and Davy Fitz and the Lohans,” some cleverclogs will doubtless chime in. Yes, they had. But we didn’t know that at the time). Daly declared last year that if Dublin were to win silverware under his immediate successor as manager rather than on his watch, he’d take satisfaction from having done his bit in contributing to the great leap forward: the John the Baptist to the next man’s messiah, as it were. That was sensible. Some 50 years have passed since the county’s last Leinster title, and one has to rewind to 1938 for their most recent All-Ireland. No individual can be expected to turn the tide of history.
But what Daly can and should be able to achieve is to restore them to their former status in Leinster, traditionally a two-party — or a one and a half-party — state. Dublin and Kilkenny for the first half of the 20th century, Wexford and Kilkenny from the beginning of the 1950s to the end of the 1970s, Offaly and Kilkenny for the next two decades. For the past 10 years it’s been a one-party state. Galway aside, turning Dublin into the second-best team in Leinster consistently would be no mean accomplishment. And Kilkenny will be rebuilding for the next few seasons. A gap in the market is about to open.
Of late, Dublin have shown every sign that they can fill it. They came from behind to draw their opening National League fixture away to Waterford, beat Tipperary and despite having only 18 fit players, saw off none other than Kilkenny in the Walsh Cup final. That last bit was, for Dublin, quite an achievement. So was the next bit: seven days later they travelled to Tullamore and, far from preening themselves and their new silverware, proceeded to beat Offaly by 13 points. It was the kind of thing that Kilkenny, with their attitude of amnesia towards eaten bread, routinely do. It wasn’t the kind of thing that Dublin routinely do. Not until now.
Clearly the return of the southside native, Conal Keaney, has had ramifications both tangibly — in the three league outings to date he has hit 0-33 of the team’s 5-58 — and in terms of lifting all boats morale-wise.
Yet the acquisition of the former Tipperary forward Ryan O’Dwyer may turn out to be almost as critical. O’Dwyer brings abrasiveness that the Dublin attack — neat hurlers who lack the physical wherewithal to discomfit the likes of Tommy Walsh and JJ Delaney — have lacked.
One cameo against Tipperary a few weeks back told a tale in this regard. O’Dwyer won possession under the Hogan Stand during the second half, saw Brendan Maher a couple of steps away and, sliotar in hand, ploughed straight into the Borrisoleigh man before offloading to Liam Rushe, who set up Keaney for a point. It was unnecessary, it was gratuitous, it might easily have resulted in a Tipp free — and it was exactly the type of statement calculated to put a song in the manager’s heart. Here was a Dublin forward who relished a battle and who wasn’t too choosy about how he carried it to the opposition. The subsequent debate on television involving Seanie McGrath as to the rights and wrongs of players changing counties missed the point. If Ryan O’Dwyer makes the Dublin team this summer it’ll be because he has shown he can do a job no homegrown forward was able to do. There’s nothing inherently objectionable in that.
And granted, the day may well come when Dublin field a bulky forward line that lack the craft to open up the opposition. The day will surely come when Keaney is below par and the men around him struggle to compensate in output. But these are not matters that will detain Daly for the moment. Constructing an attack with a few jagged edges, an attack capable of displacing serious water in the championship, is his priority.
Dublin could not possess a man better qualified for the task. Where they are now, the manager was in his day. He was that soldier, a member of a group with similar dreams and aspirations. Somewhere along the way to the uplands he learned, as the Dublin players must learn, to be ambitious for the higher gifts. It may have been the day two decades ago, after one of the endless Clare/Waterford games that constituted his championship routine at the time, that Daly came off the field at Semple Stadium feeling pretty satisfied with his performance at corner-back. Okay, so he may not have set the world on fire, but he’d kept his man scoreless, cleared a few balls and generally done all the things a corner-back is supposed to do.
Imagine his surprise, then, on being buttonholed by one of the Clare selectors, a certain G Loughnane, and told in no uncertain terms that this wasn’t good enough, that Daly was capable of better and that he had to be a leader, not a footsoldier. Too many of the latter and not enough of the former was the reason. Dublin died soft against Antrim in the qualifiers last year. Daly cannot let it happen again and will not.
He may not be the messiah. But hey, John the Baptist did a decent job too.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
