ON GAELIC GAMES:Donegal will expect to test Pat Gilroy's men more than Tyrone while Kerry still loom large over the horizon

DUBLIN HAVE been around these parts so long, who could blame the wary supporter for being reticent about where the Leinster champions’ path is ultimately taking them? Suddenly, there are new landmarks – an ageing Tyrone that couldn’t cope with their opponents’ dynamism and a young, hungry Donegal over whom no such question marks hover.

There is also terror within the county at the very prospect of an accelerating bandwagon (‘Dubs won’t be deterred by hype – see 12-page special’) and especially when Kerry are still around.

It’s not simply a matter of being wary of the perennial contenders and their three-decade headlock on Dublin in championships (eight-zip in the past 26 years), but the fact that nothing fuels madness and expectation like the prospect of the counties meeting in an All-Ireland final.

This would be bad enough were both counties actually in the final, but with the semi-finals yet to be negotiated, the assumptions become alarming. Mayo have plenty of issues to settle with Kerry, but the Munster champions haven’t been the ones disappointing the prospects of ‘a traditional final’ in recent years and Donegal will expect to test Dublin’s high-performance levels more probingly than Tyrone.

Dublin teams of the past decade have come within a point or two of the eventual champions (in 2002, ’07 and ’10), but it would be hard to match last Saturday’s performance without going back to the 1995 Leinster final demolition of Meath in the year the Sam Maguire last stayed in the capital.

There is a link between the two years. Sixteen years ago Pat O’Neill and the Dublin management believed in retrospect that they had peaked for that Meath match.

After the claustrophobia of the counties’ rivalry over the previous 10 years there was an intoxicating rush about that victory when Dublin didn’t wait for their old rivals to come back at them and turn what should have been a straightforward victory into a battle of nerves, instead pulling away to win by 10.

Performance levels slipped back after that in the All-Ireland series wins over Cork and Tyrone – and the team ended up fortunate enough to take the title. Even in those days before the qualifiers this was a risk.

In the years since 2001 it’s been a liability and too often Dublin have been overly-pleased with themselves for winning Leinster and, wittingly or not, have put too much into the task or shown too much of themselves.

It’s no coincidence the county’s most coherent campaigns at All-Ireland level since 2002 have come in the past two years after their two most mediocre provincial championships. The penny has dropped that the football season isn’t all about getting to the August Bank Holiday; it’s about getting there with plenty in the tank.

As team captain Bryan Cullen said after the scrappy defeat of Wexford: “The season begins now.”

Paradoxically, just as Dublin have learned to treat the early phase of the season with more circumspection, the stock of the provincial championships has risen dramatically. Last year’s wipe-out of provincial winners shone a spotlight on the advantages of the sustained programme of matches provided by the qualifier route, but this year has put that in context.

One All-Ireland-winning selector from the pre-qualifier era said last week that, in the past, a period of three weeks had always been regarded as the ideal interval between matches, allowing enough time to come down from the previous fixture and re-establish tempo. That was evident in the superior staying power of all four provincial champions.

There were a couple of elements to Dublin’s game that was much-improved on previous outings at All-Ireland level. Firstly, the pressure was maintained throughout the match. Even in last year’s defeat of Tyrone there was a lapse in the third quarter that saw Dublin trailing at the break and fatally, the late fade-out that allowed Cork shade the subsequent semi-final.

That didn’t happen last Saturday. After the 15th minute they never led by less than three points, once the second half began the minimal margin stretched to five and after the 38th minute the lead never dipped below seven and got up as far as 10.

There was no wilting in the possession stakes either. Although there were virtually no contested, clean catches, Dublin won their own restarts nearly 2:1 (13-7) and narrowly lost Tyrone’s (13-17). The overall success rate of 55 per cent goes up to over 60 when the short, uncontested kick-outs are stripped out.

The high scoring might have been facilitated by loose marking, but the standard of kicked scores was high and the ability to convert accurately from distance will be critical against more tightly-configured defences. Still, only six teams in the history of the qualifiers have scored more from play in an All-Ireland quarter-final than Dublin managed last weekend.

Four of them went on to lift Sam Maguire.

Caveats from the win are, however, valid. The team was under little pressure on Saturday in that the players virtually won all of their individual battles. That is unlikely to be the case in what matches remain.

Accordingly, it will be important to take goal opportunities when they arise. There was much to admire in the way Dublin opened up the Tyrone defence for goal chances and many of the consequent misses were agonisingly narrow but in a tighter match that kind of disappointment can be very costly.

A free count of 36 is another aspect of the game that is likely to prove more costly in the future, even if some of Joe McQuillan’s calls against Dublin were mystifying.

* On Saturday,it will be three months exactly since Catherine Quinn passed away after a long struggle with primary pulmonary hypertension, which not even a double lung transplant last year was able to resolve.

The wife of Derry All-Ireland medallist Danny Quinn and mother of their three young children, she will be honoured on 13th August by a special event at the Bellaghy club, which will also raise funds for the hospitals which treated Catherine during her nine years of illness.

Two matches will take place, the first at 4pm re-enacting the 1994 county final between Ballinascreen and Bellaghy. An hour later the contest will be between the 1989 Sigerson-winning St Mary’s team and Derry’s 1993 All-Ireland winners.

Danny Quinn was involved in both successes and all of the St Mary’s side have made themselves available, including Benny Tierney, Jarlath Burns, Pascal Canavan, Séamus Downey and Malachy O’Rourke.

For further details, visit the website, www.cairdecatherine.com or the Facebook page www.facebook.com/cairdecatherine.