ON SUNDAY, Dublin face Waterford in Dungarvan in the last round of the National Hurling League, knowing victory would ensure they meet the same opponents a fortnight later in a straight fight to remain in Division One A.
It’s straight-forward now: they want to avoid becoming the first county that goes from winning the league to being dumped out of it a year later.
“You don’t want that stigma attached to you,” said Ryan O’Dwyer yesterday. “Look, we know what we need to do this weekend and two weeks after that; but at the end of the day it’s all about the championship.
“Our aim is an All-Ireland, but we don’t want that thing attached to us that, ‘Oh, you got relegated but you won the All-Ireland’. We want to build on it. We want to get clapped out into a Division One A first round game next year after winning the All-Ireland.”
A winless campaign thus far, it has at least unearthed more young talent. O’Dwyer’s dismissal for a second yellow during that 11-goal frenzy down in Kilkenny a few weeks ago forced others to lead the line.
“What was great about it was lads stepping up to the plate. Eamonn Dillon, ‘Trollier’, coming on there and catching a ball over Paul Murphy’s head and bagging a goal. It shows there is someone special there. He’s an outstanding character.
“Danny Sutcliffe, like, he goes out one week and plays wing back against Galway and plays a stormer. Goes out against Cork and John Gardiner is taken off. How often do you see that?
“I was joking with Danny in the showers after and I said, ‘Jeez, when I was playing with Tipp, John Gardiner finished my Tipp career, you’re after finishing his Cork career’.”
He quickly realises it may be construed poorly along the River Lee: “Well, Jesus, I’ll come up against Gardiner now later in the year and he’ll kill me! And Tommy Walsh the next week.
“It just shows he’s [Sutcliffe] got a cockiness in the right manner. He doesn’t care who he’s marking, he’s going to deliver.”
Still, O’Dwyer believes his sending off is a contributing factor in Dublin finding themselves on the brink of relegation.
“I’m taking personal responsibility for that; it was my stupidity that got us in that position in the first place. I think we would have won that game but for me. I’ll have to redeem myself.”
