It has become increasingly difficult to retain football All-Irelands in an era of qualifiers

The season is all but done. It will be three months before we’ll be writing reviews of the football year even though the only data missing right now is one match. But All-Irelands dominate the entire 12 months. When we look back through the decades at a particular year the first thought is virtually always who took home the Sam Maguire.

In four days, allowing that the replay hex appears to have shifted to hurling, the narrative for the year will be written.

It could be a sensational victory for Kerry – in the absence of the game's most celebrated player – and how many times can that ever be truly said about one of the county's All-Ireland triumphs?

Or does it simply become the memory of a time we got to the final even though the Gooch was injured?

For Donegal the stakes are higher. The county has two All-Irelands to date. If Sunday goes well they've increased their roll-of-honour space by 50 per cent; for Kerry the comparable figure would be 3 per cent.

Jim McGuinness will also be aware that the record of teams who launch a coup on the defending champions isn’t always positive, and that hands which wield the dagger in football frequently don’t raise the crown. In fact only one county has managed it in the last 17 years.

What tends to get forgotten when the history is written, if not by the winners then certainly about them or through the prism of their experience, is that an entire championship had unfolded organically in the weeks and months before the end of September.

Competitiveness

The great quality of the football championship in the era of the qualifiers and even farther back during the past quarter of a century has been its sheer competitiveness, how difficult it has been to win, and how resistant it has been to dynasty-building.

Of course Kerry have done best and written a lengthy chapter into the county’s gilded history even during this age of egalitarianism. But only once have they successfully defended the title and in only one, 2004, or two, 2007, years have they dominated the championship.

As for footballing styles, how often have we glimpsed the future in September and deemed it to be long-term only for revision to become necessary in a matter of months?

This year has defiantly maintained that trend. In the projected era of Dublin the game would bend to the power of attack: nothing personal, just that’s where they have the players and the bench reserves. When the Panzers rumbled through the spring to complete a league-championship-league triptych, what else was there to think?

The inevitability of it all caused many, myself most definitely included, to overlook inconvenient detail: why has it been so hard to retain All-Irelands? Furthermore, if the trend towards offensive configuration was so irresistible how come two of the most conspicuously gifted forward lines in the league – Cork and Tyrone – were crushed in the championship?

The focus sharpened on Dublin and Mayo and the presumed renewal of their rivalry from last year's final even though such a thing hadn't happened for 26 years.

Both counties suffered from weak provincial competition.

The danger here hasn’t so much been the inability to get tested fully but the associated protection against being beaten. In the years of the current format the provinces outside of Leinster have all produced winners through the qualifier system – a journey that obviously involves losing.

Arguably Dublin’s most revelatory year was 2010 when they did lose in Leinster and yet fashioned a new persona when progressing along the outside track.

Defeat forces fundamental reappraisals and purges hubris.

And there was plenty of hubris in last month’s semi-finals. Dublin deemed the usual tactics sufficient to deal with Donegal even when things were going wrong and their six-man half forward line was coming off second best against their opponent’s six-man half back line.

Stand like sentries

Suddenly we could see why Pat Gilroy and Mickey Whelan posted a six-strong defence to stand like sentries observing the play in the semi-final of 2011 when the counties previously met.

Rapidly it dawned on us why Ger Brennan was a significant loss when in the absence of his centre back instinct and organisational acumen the area behind Dublin’s centrefield became a runway.

There has been a brushing down of bruised sentiment in Dublin and a vow to come back stronger – a penitential view that this will be a useful learning experience. It may well be but the 2014 All-Ireland is not coming back and the bid to win back-to-back titles for the first time in 37 years has now become an attempt to do so for the first time – at the earliest – in 39 years.

The achievement of three All-Irelands in four years, done by only Kerry in the past 30 years, will also wait at least another two seasons.

Most disappointing though for Jim Gavin will be how the axe fell. The spectre of a challenge, and probably an unexpected one, arising at some stage must have occupied his thoughts all year. He and his players must have hoped that Dublin would have risen to it more impressively.

James Horan has departed Mayo, having admirably rebuilt the brand and returned the county to the elite table – all without doing what everyone in the country, never mind the county, outside of their immediate opponents would wish for them.

The scale of Horan’s achievement was that until his very last engagement, the semi-final against Kerry, Mayo had never lost a championship match that they were expected to win and only the best were good enough to defeat them.

Regrets must run deep though. Five points up in the 66th minute of the drawn semi-final and Rob Hennelly’s free at the end of normal time in the replay needing just an allergic sneeze to see it drop over the bar.

Unconvincing

Despite being handed a perfect diagnostic of the problem caused by

Kieran Donaghy

in the few minutes at the end of the drawn encounter, Horan pushed on in the replay without an obvious corrective and it was noticeable that in his recent interview with the

Western People

his response to a question about this was at best unconvincing.

It doesn't, however, change the fact that he left Mayo in a far stronger state than that in which he found it, and nothing more can reasonably be asked of a manager. "The moving hand writes and having writ moves on." smoran@itishtimes.com