GAELIC GAMES:A Dublin win tomorrow could see the hype machine hit overdrive. MALACHY CLERKINtalks to former boss Tommy Lyons, Colin Moran and Mark Vaughan about what it's like in the middle of the storm

THIS IS not a piece of hype. This is a piece about hype. The distinction is important, for it would be easy to confuse the one for the other. Especially on this of all weekends when a combination of a first national final in 16 years and actual, genuinely fair weather will bring Dubs of every flock and flavour to Croke Park. Hardcore, softcore, Inchicore – the bandwagon will have to make room for them all if Pat Gilroy’s side take Cork tomorrow. Give it another couple of months and suppose they add a Leinster title, it’ll be like someone snipped the brakes. And the hype will fall like rain.

So what’s it like beneath the umbrella? Colin Moran spent eight seasons there under three different regimes. Tom Carr, Tommy Lyons and Paul Caffrey all had different ideas about how to approach it but the one thing they agreed on was that it couldn’t be ignored. “You would definitely be aware of it inside the squad,” says Moran. “You could feel it happening. There are so many vested interests in Dublin’s success, particularly in the media and with sponsors. When Dublin get on a bit of a roll, it does go into overdrive.”

Lyons was a circus barker when it came to these matters. The squad he took over at the end of 2001 had been Maurice Fitzed down in Thurles the previous summer and hadn’t won Leinster in seven years – their longest spell without a provincial title since the late 1960s-early ’70s. The way he saw it, hype was something to be harnessed and put to work. You’re not going to beat it, you may as well use it for your own ends.

“It’s completely and utterly unavoidable in Dublin’s case,” says Lyons. “I keep telling people that you have to learn to deal with it. You have no choice in the matter. I tried to ride the wave in 2002, there’s no question about that. We used it to energise us. I suppose it’s difficult to do that year-on-year but we really gave it a go in 2002. And we very nearly got over the line.

“We did feed on the hype, no doubt about it. Lads were playing 20 per cent above themselves in certain cases. That’s what it can do, it can give you an energy that is really high-octane and it can sweep you to great things.”

Where it comes from isn’t any great mystery, of course. Most of us media vultures live in the capital and the Dubs make for a tasty and dependable source of carrion. There’s regularly a Bernard Brogan or a Bryan Cullen at the press calls for the various competitions so their pictures are in the papers and their voices are on the sports news. Much of the coverage is positive, all the more so when they stitch a few results together. Positive press leads to grumbles from other counties about bias in the Dublin-based media. Et voila! You have yourself a hype hoe-down.

“We used to talk about it inside the squad,” says Mark Vaughan, no stranger himself to the odd appearance on the back pages. “We’d sort of warn each other that anything that was being said about us was only media hype or whatever. The thing is, you always notice that Kerry creep through the first couple of games of the year and you never really hear anything about them until they get to Croke Park. In Dublin, we can’t do that. It’s just impossible.”

Doesn’t stop them trying anew each go-round. Different managers try different wheezes for dealing with the media. It’s very rare that someone decrees a blanket ban but generally it’s the safer pairs of hands that are offered up. Moran mostly did his share when he was playing, although the way he saw it he was taking the path of least resistance.

“I always found it was easier to do it than to spend half your time the week of a game dodging phonecalls and screening calls just to avoid having to say ‘no’ to a journalist.”

In truth, giving up facetime or phonetime has never been the problem here. At least if you give an interview, you have some measure of control over what’s said and hype very rarely springs from what a Dublin footballer spills into a dictaphone. Inside the county panel, they preach common sense. From time to time as well, they preach avoidance. Don’t buy into the hype and you won’t be swayed by it.

“I remember one summer,” says Moran, “we had a policy of not reading the papers. I wouldn’t have let it get to me even if I had read them but we decided on this policy anyway as a squad so I stuck to it. We were in a team huddle one day before a game and one of the lads shouted over at me, ‘That was f***ing terrible what yer man said about you in the Herald! It was bang out of order. You keep the head up, right?’

“This was all news to me! I realised then that I was probably the only one not reading the bloody papers. So of course, the first thing I did as soon as I was near a computer was go and dig out the article to find out what it said.”

It doesn’t always have to be a yoke strapped to their shoulders, weighing them down. Expectation is a rough beast to tame but it thunders on under the weight of its own momentum too sometimes.

Lyons brought a semi-outsider’s view to the Dublin job with him and the knowledge of what a rampaging Dublin side does to a team that isn’t used to the hectic traffic of a Croke Park summer Sunday. He used to have to remind his players what a motivating factor the stadium itself was to counties making the day trip. Even in the knowledge that the psychology of hyping his players up was delicate, he did it because the payback could be glorious.

“When you’re winning and you’re playing well, the hype is great,” says Moran. “You genuinely feel two inches taller when you put on the jersey and walk out in front of a full house at Croke Park. Everybody has seen that with Dublin teams over the last few years – when they get on a roll and they’re in full flow, there’s probably nobody better than them.”

Dublin had one of those summers in 2007. Meath, Offaly and Laois were dispatched in Leinster, none of them getting within four points at the final whistle. This was Vaughan’s best summer, his free-taking from distance lighting up each game, his bleached hair and general cockiness pure catnip for those beyond the Pale who rail against the hype that surrounds Dublin in high summer. Predictably, he loved every minute at the time. Possibly less predictably, he’s quite reflective about it now, four years on.

“I definitely think it can have a positive effect,” he says. “It depends on the person. I liked having to perform – it’s always nice to live up to expectations. But sometimes expectations can become too high and although you probably believe you can reach them – or at least you know that you have to believe if you are going to reach them – at the back of it all, you probably know that you’re going to struggle. You can get very conflicted that way. You can really struggle. And then when it does fall apart, it hits you a lot harder. If nobody expects anything of you, then it’s far less crushing when you come up short.”

Moran was only in his second year on the panel when Lyons arrived, all bells and whistles, and looking to turn it up to 11. The new manager wanted the swagger back, he wanted them to puff out their chests and can-can through the summer. Plenty of them bought into it and enjoyed the ride. When it all ended with a one-point defeat to Armagh in the semi-final, however, there was a long way to fall before they crashed into the ground.

“It was a bit strange in Tommy’s time,” says Moran. “Similar to now with Pat, Tommy had a very young team when he came in and Dublin hadn’t won a Leinster for a few years. Then when we beat Meath in the Leinster semi-final and went on to win Leinster outright, things got going big time. And it was a bit of a crazy summer – the World Cup was on and everybody was mad into the Ireland soccer team and Croke Park had just been rebuilt. The weather was good and there was a real buzz about it all and we got on a roll. And yeah, it probably got a bit out of hand alright.

“The problem with us down the years was that we had these terrible periods when the pressure did come on and we weren’t playing well and we’ve looked a pale reflection. Our lows have been lower than the lows of other teams and that’s ultimately been our downfall. When we hit bad patches within games and from game to game, we’ve looked very poor. That’s been the big difference between Dublin and the very top teams, I think. Your Kerrys and your Tyrones can see out those bad periods and come through them. They have an ability to hang in there.”

For Lyons, not walking away from his first year with at least a final appearance was always going to be tough to recover from given the fuss they’d made. People will go along for the ride if they think it’s going to end up where they want to go. But nothing bursts a hype balloon quicker than doubt.

“The problem,” he says, “is that when you raise the expectations, you have to meet them the next time out. I made the famous comment that we had over-achieved in 2002 and everybody was very surprised and a bit annoyed even when I said it. But what I was trying to do at the time was to take down the expectation a bit. Unfortunately, that’s a far more difficult process. The genie was out of the bottle really.

“Even when the genie is still in the bottle, hype takes legs of its own that nobody can control. All you can do is try to manage the process with the players. The only people that matter are the players when they’re out between the four lines. If you can manage to get a handle on the psychological pressure of expectation, you have a chance.”

Gilroy has been clever in this regard on a number of fronts. The media are kept reasonably at arms’ length through the provision of weekly press conferences at breakfast time on a Thursday morning. He announces his team for Sunday, brings along a couple of players, fields questions and then dusts his hands. Job done until match day.

His team play a lung-busting, tackling-back style that can only work if every player buries his ego and empties himself on the pitch, fostering a genuine all-for-one-and-one-for-all vibe around the place. Photo calls and promotional work are quietly frowned upon. Even tomorrow’s final is brushed off as just another game. No big deal, they say. Lyons, for one, takes them at their word.

“I’m sure that Pat Gilroy is working overtime to deal with it. But I don’t believe this will be a defining moment of Dublin’s season win or lose. I just don’t think that’s the case. The management are progressing the thing very well. From talking to some of the players, they’re very happy, very focused and very driven. They’re in a good space at the moment. Time will tell whether they’re good enough or not.”

In the end, of course, that’s all that should matter. Play the game, win the game, lose the game, whatever. Won’t happen, though. Can’t happen, not if they get on a roll. How they handle it will count for plenty come year’s end.