‘Hardest game I’ve ever played’

Groggy from the rigours of what he hailed as “the hardest game I have ever played“, Paul Flynn was nothing like the sober man we met after the 2011 final.

Having come through a game when he was hampered by a hamstring injury, he elected not to drink alcohol that evening and instead drink in the ecstasy of a first All-Ireland title. Neat.

He imbibed last night, though. “That’s one of my biggest regrets,” he laughed of his decision two years ago.

Yet Flynn was yesterday evening punch drunk with the mixed emotions of elation and exhaustion. Describing himself as “all over the shop” and apologising for the quality of his interview, the affable two-time All Star was lucid enough to know the value of what he and his team-mates had just achieved.

“It’s unbelievable. It’s hard to put words on it because when you get one (All-Ireland) you’re saying this is all you ever want in your whole life. But I’ll be honest and there’s no harm in saying it now it would have been unjust if we only got one All-Ireland with this group of lads because the team we have there is just phenomenal. It’s just such a pleasure to play with them, I’m not going to lie.

“For the first one you never feel you are going to get there. The first one is always very special, but to do it twice, not many people have and you just have to say to yourself it’s an unbelievable feeling.

“To be honest, I’m a bit out of sorts because that was such a hard game. I don’t feel 100% but I know when I sit back and look at this I’ll have two All-Irelands in the back pocket.”

He doesn’t draw too many parallels with what happened in 2011.

“It’s a different squad, there’s a lot of different players and I love them lads I went to war with in 2011 and I love the lads I went to war with in 2013.”

Dublin didn’t lead until the final stages of the final against Kerry compared to yesterday when they went ahead for the first time in the 38th minute.

Yet Flynn knew what took more out of him. “They just didn’t stop, they just keep going. Their half-back line keep trying to go forward and you have to keep tracking them and as you can see I’m a bit tired but I’m over the moon, I’m just so happy.

“They wouldn’t leave us alone but I’d enough belief in my own fitness that if you kept going and kept going they would tire a bit more and indeed they did and we were just that little bit sharper and a bit more clinical.

“I don’t know what it looked like from the stand but it was the hardest game of football I’ve ever played and that’s being honest.”

Flynn, like he did against Kerry, pushed back to sweep in the final minutes of the game. “I was full-back for a while and Philly (McMahon) was trying to say to me, ‘You mark him’. I said ‘you’ll mark him, I’ll sweep’. “Ah no, we had to do it because poor old Rory (O’Carroll) got knocked out so he didn’t have a clue where he was. You just do what you have to do for the team and that’s all that matters.”

Flynn admitted he never experienced anything like the walking wounded in the Dublin dressing room. “O’Gara pulled his hamstring too so he was kinda gone and I knew we were going to be against it then. I was like ‘Jesus’. By playing sweeper, we invited them on and you don’t want to invite them on because you need to go man to man with them and try and stop them at source.”

Dublin’s preference under Jim Gavin clearly is to play man-on-man, though, and Flynn hopes they’ve inspired others to follow their example. “Football comes in different stages and the way we played there man-on-man, 15-on-15 going at it, attacking, hopefully all club teams are going to go that way and that’s the kind of transformation that we would like to happen.

“There were people doubting us and doubting whether we could shore it up at the back all year long. Our defence in that first-half kept us in that game. All year long they have been getting a bit of ‘gip’ but they were unbelievable today.”