Veteran Denis Bastick will never forget or forgive 2009

It was at this stage two years ago Dublin found there was a limit to their hunger as All-Ireland champions. Denis Bastick can’t say for certain if they will meet another threshold this Sunday.

“You find yourself in a difficult position, that’s what happens in the match. And then it’s how you cope with that. So can you push on or do you rest in a game? So, I think that’s when the shit hits the fan and you say, ‘well, what’s going to happen? Are you going to drive past it or are you going to retreat?’ That’s what happens in games and some teams don’t.”

For those who say Kerry will be hungrier, Bastick reminds them of “the startled earwigs” 2009 All-Ireland quarter-final defeat, a cataclysmic loss that will never be compensated for.

“Ah, no, that’s engrained your heart, you know? We often talk about ’09, but we’ve moved on, they’ve moved on, but you don’t forget about those things and I’m sure they haven’t forgot about last year’s final or the 2013 semi-final. You don’t forget and you don’t forgive either, but you just have to move on.”

Losing as they did that day, the veteran midfielder agrees it would have been difficult to believe back then they would be aiming to pick off Kerry for a fourth straight time in championship football.

“After 17 points of a defeat, you wouldn’t. You’d laugh, I suppose, wouldn’t you? But that just shows how fickle sport is, how it can change and how you’re only as good as your last game. Things change and teams change and stats change and stuff like that. It’s a case of where that’s in the past, it’s there and it’ll eventually be where there’ll be no-one left from ’09 that’ll be going on so there’ll be no connection there.”

Nothing yet has told Bastick Dublin are lacking as champions but obviously he won’t know for certain until David Gough’s final whistle. “If you look at your testing, your strength and fitness tests, there’s not any huge difference year on year. So it can’t be physical. The mental piece of the game, I think that’s the extra 10% or whatever the case may be. Everyone across the country is doing similar training in similar conditions. It’s the mentality then of players who are going to go for the ball that they shouldn’t go for. Or do that extra run that they didn’t have to run. That’s the mental piece completely that gets you over the line. I think that can be the difference between champions or not.”

Joining the Kerry team of 2006/’07 as only the second team this century to win back-to-back is a motivator if not one that is spoken about, Bastick acknowledges. “Having coming off the back of a win in ’15, I suppose it’s very much in your mind what you did after ‘11, what you did after ‘13. We weren’t able to go back to back. So, you know, it’s very easy get focused and understand how big the actual challenge is, you know?”

The hype in Dublin is now greater than it ever was yet the camp remain grounded when pre-2011 it would have swallowed them whole. “We’ve come to realise that nobody else’s opinions matter, only our own,” says Bastick. “It doesn’t matter what everyone says; it doesn’t matter what other people think. It’s about the group. It’s about what the group think. It’s about what we say to each other. It’s about what we’re trying to achieve, what we’re trying to do on the pitch, how we’re trying to perform.

“And all the noise around that doesn’t help you on the pitch. It doesn’t make you any better. It can make you worse. So why let any of that get into you if it’s not going to help you as a footballer? That’s a difficult task, especially in Dublin with all you [media] guys around here and papers flying out the door and stuff like that, but we’re trying to get to a stage where none of the media will affect us.”