Jim Gavin on All-Ireland victory: ‘We gave it our all’

If you're looking for evidence of what it takes to win back-to-back All-Irelands then Jim Gavin is wearing it on his face. That curiously pleasant weariness, which comes after not a sprint but a marathon, and carries with it a deep glow of satisfaction.

It is the morning after the night before, and whatever celebrations came after their thrilling one-point win over Mayo, and the Dublin manager is sitting back in a sofa at the Gibson Hotel, the near perfect image of pure exhaustion.

This is what happens after you’ve taken a team on a 29-game, 19-month unbeaten streak, culminating in a second successive All-Ireland, a feat Dublin last achieved in the 1970s.

It’s not that Gavin looks older for the experience, though he certainly looks the wiser, like a general leading his troops away from a hard-won battle. Anyone who thinks Dublin won this All-Ireland easily – any more than 2015, or indeed 2013, all under Gavin’s guidance – perhaps forgets just how hard a road it’s actually been.

“Yeah, it’s been a long season,” he says. “What is it now, the 40th week of the year, and we’ve been back since the second week in January, our first game in the O’Byrne Cup, so in terms of the intercounty cycle, it’s been a long season of giving it everything.

“And I couldn’t ask for any more from the players, and particularly from the management team, the backroom and the support team there who pushed really hard during the season, particularly the last two weeks (since the drawn game) to do their very best for the player group.

“Everybody’s pushing to get these players to be their best, and there’s been a really collective togetherness about the squad this year, and we gave it our all. If it didn’t work out for us on Saturday I would have no complaints because everybody just gave their all. That’s all we ever ask: from myself, or the backroom team, or the players.”

Quest for perfection

Gavin will certainly see out another term as Dublin manager in 2017, but at 45 he also knows it has increasingly become a younger man’s business, and he’s not getting any younger. What drives him, he says, is what drives the players too, that tireless quest for success and improvement.

“I have to give the players credit, no matter the outcome of any of game. They have always have gone after the process of that performance, and that is how they measure themselves . . .

“To see them going through that cycle over the last few weeks, where they’ve been asked so many questions in the drawn game, the Kerry game and the Donegal game, and throughout all the league campaigns. And a lot of their success is based on that failure piece within games: that you never get the perfect game.”

So, while Saturday’s win in Croke is “the pinnacle”, that quest can never end there: “It’s infinity. You can’t reach it. But their continuous striv[ing] for excellence is what has always impressed me about them. I’m sure it’s the same in most inter-county teams.

“As managers, we’re in a very privileged position to work with players who give so much time to their sport, in both hurling and football.”

If there is any hangover from Saturday's game it's the handling of the black cards by referee Maurice Deegan. Gavin admits there is a problem with the way the rule is being enforced.

“I’d still be an advocate of the concept of the black card and why it was brought in. It was to eradicate cynical play, body checks, trips, pull-downs and also to give respect to the officials and to opposing players.

“The black card itself is harsh – that a player, in any game, can be sent off for that type of infringement. It is time to have another look at the sin-bin. I would advocate that, I always have advocated it.

Cards under pressure

“It is hard for the officials as well in the heat of the moment to make that split-second decision. They are doing their best. It is swings and roundabouts for most teams, but it is quite punitive for the crime. We have to remember why it was brought in . . .

“There were lots of instances that we can all remember and the uproar when teams felt aggrieved, when they had chances of shots at goal and they did not get them off. It was brought in for cynical play – and there was not that much of it on Saturday, I thought.”

With that he lets the matter rest, heads off with the team to visit the children’s hospital, and after that maybe even get a bit of rest for himself.