Sideline Cut:A tremor of fear must be rippling through many of the vast fraternity of Dublin summer football fans. There is no denying the great pale blue gathering of the clans on Jones's Road is the visual extravaganza of the championship. The city is a brilliant place to be when the Dubs are on the Croke Park billing and next to a showdown with Kerry, taking on Meath is as good as it gets.
After a typically slow-burning beginning to the championship, with games full of minor surprise and hints at what may lie in store during July and August, the appearance of Dublin carries the shock and velocity of getting sprayed by a power hose on a hot afternoon. Dublin, the evocative shirts, the blustery noise on the Hill and the tradition, do more than any other county to create a national passion for the football championship. Dublin wake us up.
A good few Dubs of my acquaintance have announced themselves pessimistic about their chances this year - and even this weekend. This is no surprise. The Dubs have been pessimistic ever since 1983, when it became clear that Brian Mullins would not, after all, remain forever young, that Kevin Heffernan might have other things to do with his life and that the curtain was falling on the best of times. From reading Tom Humphries' brilliant portrayal of the Dublin versus Kerry rivalry of the 1970s, it is clear the charisma of those Dublin teams will always shine on in the pockets of the city that are steadfast GAA strongholds.
You do not have to remember the heyday of Seán Doherty or David Hickey or Tony Hanahoe to come to admire the way they allowed themselves to meld and be shaped under the mysterious and unorthodox tutelage of Heffernan. Those Dublin teams seem to capture the complexities and contradictions and the humour of the city.
The problem with assembling a team so rare and memorable is it becomes incredibly difficult for subsequent teams to step out of that shadow. While the Dublin team of the first half of the 1990s was big-hearted and weren't short on good-natured braggadocio, they were unlucky. They lost out in the classic 1991 epic series against Meath. And then they got hit by the unforeseen emergence of the trio of Ulster counties, Donegal, Derry and Down. With Kerry suffering a period of the blues following the break-up of their own great team, Dublin would surely have collected more All-Irelands only for those extraordinary three years. The city team deserved the 1995 Sam Maguire on perseverance alone, finding the inner resources to play on through the rebukes of the previous years and doing down a Tyrone team fatally addicted to the creative genius of Peter Canavan.
That victory had a washed-out feeling about it, though, a sense of something ending rather than beginning. Jason Sherlock, injured tomorrow, is the connection to that distant, heatwave summer.
Many of the fans who will show up at Croke Park tomorrow will hardly remember the last All-Ireland success, let alone the escapades of the 1970s. And for modern metropolitans, cheering on the Dubs in Croke Park has become part of the summer entertainment scene, something to do between the fortnight on the continent and the Electric Picnic weekend. Somewhere lost among the fashionistas are the three or four thousand Dublin loyalists, those who fret about the form of the team in early spring and turn up at far-flung league games down the country. But the mass Dublin support has become part of the heritage.
Dublin football cannot escape its past. Because it is the capital city team and because of the allure Dublin teams hold for many people, they are expected to win. The vast Dublin army travels in boisterous, high-humoured expectation of winning. It does not matter that those expectations have been dashed, sooner or later, for the past 11 years. Each year, the burden on Dublin teams increases. The current Dublin team are, by and large, a quiet bunch. That is partly because manager Paul Caffrey has decided the best way to cope with the glare of media pressure and marketing hype is to shield his players from it.
This is a pity, but it is his prerogative. Caffrey saw first hand how swiftly the city news and sports tribunes turned on Tommy Lyons when things fell apart. And Lyons had opened the front door of the house to the media. Caffrey might well have concluded there was just no point to following suit. And so, apart from the fly-on-the-wall documentary film that appeared last year, the Dublin footballers have been guarded as closely as the last secret of Fatima. They are honest athletes, savagely fit and, it must be said, strangely joyless in their approach to the game. Even in their purple bursts, when they are stinging opposition defences with adrenaline scores, many of their young players bear the stressed-out look of ordinary Leaving Cert students intent on getting Medicine in Trinity.
Despite being ransacked by Mayo in last year's All-Ireland semi-final and weathering a league which could be regarded as fair at best, Dublin have been a popular tip to win the All-Ireland championship. That alone brings a pressure, a near obligation to show up in early June and deliver something of a statement against Meath.
And there has been an aura about the fly boys from across the border of late. Meath teams have a particular talent for making Dublin teams doubt themselves. They barrel in from the Boyne Valley, fresh from making honey and building houses and they seem as carefree as the Dubs seem uptight. Meath have some ball players. Darren Fay has not come back to make up the numbers. Anthony Moyles is a smart operator. Graham Geraghty may or may not opt to pen an explosive political memoir but it won't stop him flashing over the kind of points that can kill a defence stone dead. And Meath have Colm Coyle on the sideline. Coyler, boy. Plenty of old corner forwards get the shivers from the mere mention of his name.
Coyler has attitude in buckets. He oozes the self-belief that was necessary to survive in Seán Boylan's old teams and, like all of Meath's ex-brigade, he radiates the conviction that Meath teams belong in Croke Park when it is packed to the rafters. Coyler will thrive in the sky blue bowl tomorrow. He will revel in it and don't be surprised if Meath get lucky here and there under Coyle. Coyler, after all, bounced a damn point over the bar to save Meath in an All-Ireland final, in 1996 against Mayo. Coyler managed a Monaghan team that beat All-Ireland champions in Armagh in 2003. Coyler stars in championship nightmares. Nothing he would like better than to become the bogeyman of the suburbs.
In the dream days of the 1970s, the rest of the country watched on as a Dublin football team responded to the machinations of the Kingdom with a team that were different and sophisticated, teak tough and irreplaceable. Because Dublin was the capital, Ireland's only city of bright lights - and those were few enough - the Blues became the glamour team elect, the crowd to beat. Thirty years on, that much still holds true. But the huge crowd and the carnival atmosphere have come to seem innocent and even deluded as the years turn.
That is nobody's fault, least of all the players. All they can do is try to harness that wild energy and that obligation and see how far it takes them. With the Dubs, it is always dramatic and it is always fun. And then it stops. Maybe this year will be different. Or maybe Meath will silence the city and still be back in the valleys to watch Colm O'Rourke chuckling modestly on The Sunday Game. This is a deadly opening Sunday for Dublin. Take a deep breath.
