Cullen in fine fettle as Dublin ready to get down to business

THIS time last year, Bryan Cullen was still struggling to tie his shoelaces but on Sunday the versatile Skerries player will wear the captain’s armband as Dublin get down to summer business starting with Laois at Croke Park.

On the opening day of the league season last year, the 27-year-old injured his back in Killarney and it was mid-June before he was free of pain and a serious option for his manager who extolled his skipper’s virtues yesterday.

“He was very consistent in the half-forward line and in some of our bigger league games this year he has done a huge job,” said Pat Gilroy.

“He seems to be very comfortable with the captaincy. He’s very good around guys and shows leadership.”

Gilroy went as far as to say it was Cullen’s loss to injury, rather than Bernard Brogan, which was the biggest contributory factor in his team letting an eight-point lead slip against Cork in the league final in April and this week’s side shows three changes in personnel from that starting selection.

Full-back Rory O’Carroll has been recalled after missing the full league campaign due to teaching commitments in France, James McCarthy will make his championship bow at wing-back and Alan Brogan is named at 13 while Denis Bastick, Paul Brogan and Tomás Quinn lose out.

Six weeks will have passed since that traumatic league decider by the time the Dubs recommence battle in Croke Park in the Leinster quarter-final and, in that light, the weekend’s performance will be scrutinised with a forensic attention to detail.

“We’ve gone through it in minute detail so we certainly picked out a lot of things where we contributed to our own downfall,” said Gilroy of that loss in late April.

“We can’t exclude ourselves from that, the management on the sideline.”

Among his mistakes, he believes, was his decision to send younger, less mature players into the cauldron but, as he said, lessons have been learned.

For a start, the players were released to their clubs for two weeks and returned to the county scene fresh for the campaign to come and Gilroy has so far failed to detect any of the dip in standards at training sessions which he noted 12 months ago.

It seems an age ago now, but those warning signs were accurate as Dublin’s provincial campaign in 2010 began with an almighty scare against Wexford and ended with the side’s new defensive template cracking spectacularly in a five-goal disaster against Meath.

“The team has more confidence going in to play the game we’re playing,” said Gilroy.

“We haven’t had these sort of completely dreadful performances this year. We might have had them for small patches of games all right but we haven’t gone through a whole game where we really didn’t perform. We’ve been more consistent this year and hopefully we’ll bring that to the game on Sunday as well.”

That loss to Cork may hang around their necks like some sort of weighty albatross but, take that one crazy endgame away, and there is nothing that suggests anything other than a long and profitable road ahead for this Dublin squad.

It isn’t so much the names in the starting 15 that stand out. Those on the outside looking in include Tomás Quinn, Bastick, Eoghan O’Gara, Paul Brogan, David Henry and Declan Lally. Add to that Paul Griffin, Eamon Fennell, Ross McConnell and Cian O’Sullivan, who are all in various states of disrepair, and it is difficult to see how Laois will not be contemplating life in the qualifiers come Monday morning.

Not that anyone in the Dublin camp will say as much. “We haven’t even had our first day out,” said Cullen. “Laois have the advantage of playing against Longford. They got that jittery first day performance out of their system so we are really expecting them to hit the ground running. Croke Park against us has usually brought the best out of them so we are expecting nothing less on Sunday.”