FOOTBALL ALL STAR TOUR:HE PROMISES they won't be doing any proper training, but Bernard Brogan could hardly disguise the feeling that Dublin's team holiday to Dubai is perfectly timed.
With a couple more days of the GAA All Star tour in Kuala Lumpur still to enjoy, Brogan will get away again next week, with his Dublin team-mates, and thus extend his break from the big freeze on home soil.
Dublin’s holiday is, of course, strictly that, as the intercounty training ban is in force, although Brogan did admit they would at least be thinking about training.
“I’d say we’ll have a few chats over there, talk a bit about training,” says the Footballer of the Year for 2010. “But it’s the last holiday, really. We all have a programme to do over Christmas to keep ourselves ticking over, but really, I think we are all looking forward to getting back into it. I think after the way we finished up this season we’re all just dying to get back out on the pitch.”
Brogan is, of course, referring to Dublin’s narrow All-Ireland semi-final defeat to eventual champions Cork, and having shared their company out here in recent days the memories are obviously refreshed: “Yeah, another 60 seconds we probably would have clawed it back again. But I think it was on the day that Cork showed the experience, showed that they wanted it a tiny bit more.
“They’d been there, they’d done it before. It was a big game for us and a lot of young lads on the panel, and we hadn’t been in that position before, a lot of us.
“Games like that come down to luck and the bounce of a ball. But the way I look on it, we left it behind. But then we can take a lot from the season. We beat Kerry during the league. We beat Tyrone in the championship. We beat Armagh. We were that close to Cork, so we’ve nothing to be afraid of next year. Whereas in other years, going up against the Tyrones, the Kerrys and the Corks, all these big teams, we’ve folded.
“But next year we’ll have that confidence, and we’ll have a new batch of players in that don’t have the regard for these teams that we may have had in the years gone by.”
Brogan has on recent occasions paid tribute to Dublin manager Pat Gilroy for the way he drew so much more out of him as a player this year, and he reiterated that here – beginning with those famous early morning sessions: “It was tough going, but mentally, it built up huge strength. So I think it will be more of the same next year.
“But those early morning sessions we did, he was always working on me. He was always, let’s say, picking on me. I was kind of his project for the early part of the year, and it seemed to work.
“I had reasonable success with Dublin in the past, but Pat really put me to the pin of my collar and questioned me at the start of the year and made me work hard.
“He laid it on the line what he wanted from me. I had to work on it and I wouldn’t be sitting on Player of the Year if it wasn’t for Pat, that’s a fact.”
All of which makes Brogan even more of a marked man. “That just goes with it. If you’ve a good year, next year you’re man-marked or double-marked or whatever way a team have a plan to stop you.”
