Griffin: We can grind it out

HE’S a bona fide hard luck story but Paul Griffin doesn’t have a violin.

In fact, the Dublin vice-captain is more likely to be found with an iPad in his hands on Sunday as he assists Ray Boyne and the rest of the Dublin team.

Better to be doing something than moping around and dwelling on missing out on an All-Ireland final appearance he has been seeking since his inter-county debut in 2004.

Sure, it’s been tough, damaging his cruciate in a league game against Monaghan last year only to suffer complications with it this season.

But he’s moved on from the disappointment. Maybe it’s because he’s a physio and has become numbed by seeing so many injuries and disappointments.

“Look, it would be nice to be involved in playing football but those things happen. You get injured. It’s just one of those things.

“It’s about dealing with it as a group. You’d like to be there to help guys perform but you just have to find a way to deal with it.”

Asked to remain in the panel by Pat Gilroy, he’s seen almost first-hand just how well the Dublin defence has done in his absence.

They are light years ahead of where they were two years ago when Griffin was part of the back-line that coughed up 1-24 to Kerry.

By the end of the game, he had played in three different positions as he attempted to fire-fight the infernos lit by the Kingdom.

“I started off wing-back, then as the alarm bells started ringing I went full-back and then out centre-back. I did a bit of a tour of the pitch. We were trying different things I suppose. We weren’t as far gone in terms of our development.”

Dublin were the fancied team that year and it was as if Kerry took umbrage at such a tag.

“Kerry’s strength has always been their ability to punish you,” said Griffin. “They’re a most efficient team at getting scores. If they get possession they’ll convert. They don’t miss very much. Our difficulty that day was that for 25 minutes we just didn’t contain them at all. So it was just a barrage of attacks and scores going over. The game was over at that point because of the distance they’d put between us and them.

“You would hope at the moment we’d be able to control games slightly more and make ourselves more difficult to play against. But again it’s a case of a group of 15 doing it.

“It’s not a case of the full-back line holding tight or six backs holding tight. It’s about a unit working hard and limiting the chances that their forwards get.”

It wasn’t all Kerry, though. The defeat was just as much a reflection on how poor Dublin were.

“A game is 70 minutes long. Whatever happens in the first 10 or 15 minutes shouldn’t dictate things. But I think that day we didn’t get a start, we didn’t get in control and we didn’t secure any quality ball in the first 25 minutes. I think by that stage it was just too far gone.”

It was a watershed moment for Gilroy and one Dublin initially struggled to recover from in the following year’s Leinster campaign.

Those games against Wexford and Meath were test cases for the new defensive, counter-attack system.

Dublin had to learn on their feet in the qualifiers but they did to the extent that they came close to an All-Ireland final.

But Griffin insists that their footballing talents are not straightjacketed by the new strategies and attacks.

“I think all the guys that are there are good natural footballers. They’ve always been natural footballers, at underage as well. They play their own game. They play their own position and they’re confident of themselves. As a team we’ve made life slightly easier on ourselves in that everyone is working hard and that makes it awful easy for the defence to.

“There’s more pressure on ball coming in and they’re not having to chase around as much after guys. It allows them to try to contest that first ball and it’s always easier if you can win it out in front.”

Kerry present more of a conundrum for Dublin, though.

“It’ll be more challenging than some of the other games we would have faced. You’re probably looking at three or four or less maybe that would really pose a risk of scores (up to now). Kerry probably have seven or eight guys that can all clip over a couple of points. It poses a different challenge and it’s going to test our defensive resolve.

“But that’s the challenge we’re ready for.”