A cloud of discontent has begun to hang over the Dublin football team as they sharpen their weaponry for a bid towards Irish sporting immortality.
Complaints over financial and population advantages are so commonplace that they have become associated with this generation of players, threatening to muddy their ongoing accomplishment, to the understandable resentment of Dublin players and supporters alike.
The manner in which the perpetual Leinster Champions dismissed Meath last Sunday deepened fears that this All-Ireland Championship is a kind of pretence in which everyone is indulging: that Dublin are way out in front and are All-Ireland champions-elect. But is it really that clear cut?
If you are a Dublin supporter – whether the tens of thousands who materialise for the showy games of high summer or the more select group who hit booking.com as soon as the league schedule for Monaghan, Galway or wherever is announced – then you may have had a few uneasy moments when thinking about the Leinster final victory.
For a start it was a basket case of a match in which the Meath players, for reasons they have doubtlessly exorcised in the analysis room, effectively forgot how to score. Nothing on the board after half an hour: that kind of stall is fatal to a team’s self-belief and purpose.
And yet Dublin themselves failed to register a score for the first 10 minutes of the match. And after half an hour they lagged behind in possession, 42 per cent to Meath’s 58 per cent.
There was an interesting moment in the television broadcast shortly before half time when Darragh Moloney, in commenting on a Dublin defensive sequence, said: “That’s – he looks like a left half back – Paul Mannion.” Right enough, there was Dublin’s stellar attacking talent mucking into the collective defensive effort.
Frame by frame shows just how defensively oriented Dublin have become in this fifth year of dominance as opposed to their first. It’s never much remarked upon but Dublin have become a heavily defensive team, flooding the available attacking channels with blue shirts and relying on their speedster ball carriers and exceptionally empathetic kick-passing to work the ball up to their lethal attackers for the fun stuff.
Even as teams like Donegal and Tyrone have adapted a bolder and faster attacking philosophy, Dublin appear to have become more conservative and considered as their All-Ireland odyssey deepens.
Worrying sight
On the 30-minute mark of the Meath game, there came for Dublin perhaps the most worrying sight of all: James McCarthy sitting on the field and grimacing in pain, limping heavily as he retired from the match minutes later.
Along with Stephen Cluxton, McCarthy has been the key individual influence of this Dublin era: a unique player who is irreplaceable. If his body were to break down before the end of this Championship then Dublin would suddenly look less omnipotent.
For all of the arguments that Dublin have this tailor-made replacement team just lying in storage in some hangar off the M50 somewhere, this is not a particularly young Dublin squad. Cluxton is 37. Michael Darragh Macauley and Kevin McManamon are 32. Philly McMahon is 31. Rory O’Carroll and Jonny Cooper are 29.
Each of these players – and personalities – have played vital roles in this extraordinary period for Dublin football. The assumption that, once they retire, they will be seamlessly replaced is taking a lot for granted. Who, for instance, is the heir apparent to the role inimitable mastered by Bernard Brogan: a free-taker, a ball-winner and a lurking small-square poacher. You can’t just manufacture that combination.
After 58 minutes in the Leinster final, Dublin had scored 0-11. They had four wides. Because Meath were stuck on 0-3, the contest remained dismally one-sided. Then Dublin’s usual suspects – Dean Rock, Paddy Andrews – came in to keep the pressure on their colleagues by rattling over a series of good-looking points against a shattered Meath defence who knew the game was long up.
Dublin’s 67th-minute goal was inevitable, but it was also interesting. Once the All-Ireland champions gained possession from Meath’s kickout, they instantly fell into training ground methodology, executing the kind of give-and-go fast-break drill they’ve been perfecting for years.
Runner inside
When Dean Rock took possession in front of the Cusack Stand he knew before he even turned around that he’d have a runner inside. You see it again and again with Dublin; receivers on given spots of the field with no mind to do anything with the ball other than to execute either a return hand-pass to cover-breaking runners like McCarthy or Ciarán Kilkenny or to the runner coming off like a train through the inside channel, just as Con O’Callaghan did on Sunday.
It’s an indictment of other coaching staffs that they haven’t figured out ways to consistently cut out the passing lanes which Dublin like to exploit.
When Brogan was the focal point of the Dublin inside forward line, he waited and waited and waited until his man was drawn to the ball before making his cut towards goal.
Niall Scully has been using the same backdoor move for the past two seasons virtually unnoticed until he scores the goal which appears to just happen.
They don’t just happen. It’s rehearsal. They’ve been killing teams with these fundamental training ground moves for years. It’s practice disguised as flamboyance. The strange thing about Sunday last is that, awful as Meath were, the Dublin flamboyance was less explicit.
That’s where Dublin are at as they prepare for the critical phase of their summer of hope and history. The argument that they were only moving in second gear against Meath was probably true: it was a second-gear kind of game.
However, the presumption that they can simply flick a switch and achieve their highest register is less clear. We saw nothing of that in the League or so far in the Championship. The expectation is that it will materialise over the course of the Super 8s.
Huge favour
The GAA could have done Dublin a huge favour in this year’s Championship by ensuring that they only played one of their Super 8s series games in Croke Park.
The complaints about Dublin’s population advantages are simply stupid, as if nobody realised there were a million plus people in the city before they became All-Ireland serial winners. The argument over financing holds some truth but it’s a two-sided and largely tedious debate.
However, the lie that Croke Park is not Dublin’s home ground just infuriates the other competing counties. And it misses a trick. With a bit of imagination Dublin could be facing potential road games in Cork and Tyrone or Kildare in their group. And in general the prospect of the All-Ireland champions going into hostile, packed-out grounds in Mayo or Armagh or Donegal is riveting.
Yes, tickets would be gold dust. And, yes, not everyone who wanted to see that game live would get to do so. So what? It would help to kill this notion that the GAA is aiding and abetting some kind of conspiracy in which the Dubs, the cash cow, must triumph in Croke Park.
The increasing negativity is unfair on a generation of Dublin footballers who through fierce dedication have been instrumental in harnessing the enormous reservoir of energy available to metropolitan teams. And it’s also inevitable: the public wants to see something different.
The 2019 All-Ireland is still Dublin’s to lose. But there were signs, in their predictable sweep of Leinster, that there is at least a chance of them losing it if some other leading team can be sufficiently smart and sharp and cold to snatch it away from them.
