Running to a standstill?

ALEX FERGUSON’S penchant for sharing a glass of vin rouge with his fellow managers has yet to catch on in the GAA but Pat Gilroy and Justin McNulty would have a fair bit to talk about were they of a mind to break out the corkscrew after tomorrow’s Leinster SFC quarter-final in Croke Park.

The Dublin boss is a successful businessman but he gambled his career on the sideline last year when he tore up the blueprint inherited from Paul Caffrey in winter 2008 in favour of a more defensive, less flamboyant system of operations.

McNulty didn’t need the evidence of a first season spent watching his new charges in Laois before instilling a similar modus operandi and so it is that two teams sharing a common philosophy will take their wares to the most unforgiving of marketplaces this weekend.

The midlanders achieved league promotion with their new approach but they are a year behind in their evolution. Delivering a script which delivers a first Laois victory over the Dubs since 2003 is difficult and Gilroy, for one, knows just how large a task McNulty has undertaken. Last year the Dubliner did something similar, smoothing out as many creases as possible in the spring but not nearly enough to prevent a disastrous 40 minutes against Wexford in their provincial opener and a humiliating five-goal defeat to Meath, before pain gave way to pay-off and a run through to an All-Ireland semi-final.

“It’s brave in terms of just trying to do something different instead of staying with the status quo and he has probably had a bit of resistance to that,” says Gilroy of McNulty. “It’s hard to break down and requires a lot of effort to deal with it.

“For Laois to be up in Division One is a fair achievement and they’ll be dangerous because they have a lot of good players, but if we perform as we can, we should win the game.”

It is hard to argue with that but, while Laois should be well within their compass, the jury will remain out on Gilroy’s methods and whether they can navigate a successful passage through to September, as suspicion lingers that their greatest strength could also be their Achilles heel.

Gilroy’s game plan calls for gut-busting effort and necessitates a well-oiled rota of substitutions to maintain productivity but two late losses to Cork on the biggest of stages suggests his squad may not have either the quality or fitness to pull it off. Or both.

That is despite the trawl for new talent and the pre-dawn mid-winter training sessions — but maybe Dublin simply don’t have enough players of the requisite talent and maybe it is beyond amateur players to reach the level of conditioning needed for what it is they seek to do.

“You work hard for the first half and get the break and go again,” says wing-forward Paul Flynn.

“You say to yourself (at half time), ‘the possibility is I’m going to probably come off after 20 minutes’ because of the way we play.”

It is, he admits, a very different mindset. Egos have had to be curbed. So too, were attacking instincts.

Laois’s recent fixtures have revealed similar symptoms and they look like they will struggle to put up sufficient numbers on the scoreboard as they lack a forward of Bernard Brogan’s class.

Unlike Ferguson, Justin McNulty can’t rectify that with a cheque book.

Picture: HARD SLOG: Paul Flynn, pictured at DCU yesterday, says the current Dublin side has no room for passengers. Picture: Morgan Treacy/Inpho