Dubs desperate for winning feeling

WERE he still a supporter, Pat Gilroy would say Dublin have to win Sunday’s Allianz Football League Division 1 final but his current position as manager prevents him from making such grand statements.

He says it’s completely reasonable for fans to believe it’s necessary for the Blues to pick up a national title.

“Of course, I was a Dublin supporter myself and I thought Dublin had to win the All-Ireland every year when I was a supporter, so that’s totally understandable,” he said.

“That expectation is out there, you just have to get on with it.

“We really want to win this game. If we don’t, we’ll have to find out why we didn’t and maybe there’s good lessons to be learned for later in the year but if we want to make progress during the summer Cork are going to be one of the big teams we’re going to have to out-perform.

“The only reason you play is to win things. I’ve personally not got involved in a team that I didn’t think we could win something. Whether it’s this or something, we’ve got to pick up stuff this year or it’s definitely regression for us.”

Having said that, Gilroy claims it would be a step back for Dublin were they to beat Cork and fail to get any further in this year’s championship than the All-Ireland semi-finals they reached last summer.

“I would actually see that as regression rather than progression,” he maintained.

To illustrate his point, Gilroy has no idea where his 1993 league-winning medal is. “It’s not one of those things you’d harp on about,” he smiled.

Gilroy appears to be more interested in beating the opposition on Sunday than the prize on offer for doing as much.

Cork remain the benchmark for him despite Dublin’s win over them in February. While it might seem he is exaggerating the poor mouth, he has enough statistics on hand to just about get away with it.

“They are the best team in the country, they’re NFL and All-Ireland champions. For me they came back from their holidays quite late and yet ended up in a league final... that says a hell of a lot about them.

“They played without the Nemo guys, played without the U21s, I wouldn’t be fooled into reading anything other than Cork are the best team in the country until somebody knocks them off their perch.”

Still, Dublin did a remarkable job in quenching Cork’s firepower on their last day out, depriving them of their usual diet of frees from scoreable positions and reducing them to long-range efforts.

Dublin conceded just three frees in the second half, a dividend Gilroy says wasn’t worked on intensively after their discipline let them down last August.

“I think you have to be conscious of it, we learned the lesson about our discipline on frees. There are teams that can win frees against you and all the top teams have that.

“We were a little bit naïve in the last two championship games last year, giving away far too many frees in scoreable positions so that’s something we’ve really worked at, and it has been quite good in the league.

“But it is hard because it’s almost got to stage where you cannot put your hand on a forward at all or he’ll go down or grab your hand so it takes twice as much work to keep out a forward and not foul him.”

Sunday marks the counties’ third meeting in eight months and Gilroy believes there’s enough grounds to suggest it’s become a rivalry that will grow.

“I think it probably can, both teams have relatively strong panels at the minute. In 2009 both teams were the form teams coming into the All-Ireland quarter-final and we got stuffed and they eventually got stuffed as well.

“Both of us were strong that year as well... it could be a rivalry that’ll happen but I think there are a lot of teams coming.

“Division 2 was played at a very serious pace towards the end of the league, I watched some of it so the Leinster championship is going to be a very difficult place so that’ll be our focus after Sunday.”

Gilroy also revealed Dublin intend cranking up their training next month after a league campaign in which he feels he hasn’t really pushed his players on the training pitch.

“Since the middle of February we’ve trained only once a week. I wouldn’t consider we’ve really cooked the lads too hard during the league.

“In January we certainly did more than once a week alright but since then we’ve only gone once a week.

“This week we trained on Tuesday, that’s it…. we’ll train on Saturday (tomorrow) and that’s it.

“There’s plenty left in our lads, there’s three months now of going mainly once a week — the odd week where we’d have done two — but fitness-wise there’s plenty left in the tank and we’ve serious work ahead of us.

“We’ll go back to the clubs for two weeks after that but then we’ll do a serious bank of training, a couple of tough weeks before the championship.”