Lyons and his Dubs are back in town

All-Ireland SFC qualifiers: "Oh, is it?" questions Tommy Lyons when told Croke Park is going to sell out for Sunday's double-bill of football qualifiers. He only barely disguises his sense of jest. The truth is the Dublin manager has been longing for this day. Salvation is in the air.

So they're still coming off Desolation Row and they won't be singing that Thin Lizzy song, but the Dublin footballers are back in town. Beat Roscommon on Sunday and they're into an All-Ireland quarter-final. Lyons never lost sight of being here, even in the face of the city anarchy that followed the defeat to Westmeath eight weeks ago.

"Yeah, I saw us getting back. I said at the time that Westmeath were not a bad football team, and lots of people were reading too much into our defeat rather than Westmeath's win. But our target at the beginning of the year was to be in the championship at the start of August. That's where we're at now."

There remains an element of caution in everything Lyons professes. Two years ago Dublin also played football at Croke Park on the August Bank Holiday with Lyons atop of the euphoria. The lessons since then have been frequent and mostly hard. Not to mention discouraging. But, like failure, success can sometimes be just around the corner.

If losing to Westmeath proved some of Dublin's critics right, then Westmeath winning the Leinster title helped prove what Lyons had said equally right. Not that he's going to stir that one up.

"No, it's not about proving any point. It's about us getting on with our job. But the fact is we've been beaten by the two Leinster champions in the last two years. And last year went out against Armagh after a second half which we all know was bizarre. And I still feel we're very focused, very together. And, as I've said all year, I've never been with a bunch of guys as united. That's the way it's been since January.

"And I thought there were 25 minutes there against Westmeath when we played some fantastic football. People seem to forget that. When they analyse games they often look at the things we did wrong. But we did a lot of good things against Westmeath in the first half.

"We just didn't kill the game when we were in a position to kill it. And then, in the first 10 minutes of the second half, we kicked three or four wides that none of us were happy with. That gave Westmeath hope and they came back at us, and that's where the game went from us."

Yet that was the game that sent Dublin down the qualifier route, a cool dry place, away from the true heat of championship football. Getting London, Leitrim and Longford epitomised the luck of that draw, and Lyons is not going to deny that.

"Well, the qualifier route suits you as long as you keep winning. Otherwise it's no good. We saw again that it didn't suit the likes of, say, Limerick this year.

"I just think everybody needs a little rub of the relic, and we know we got that. But to achieve anything in sport you need a little bounce of the ball, so we're all looking forward to coming back to Croke Park now. The players are all in good form, and they're mad keen to get out there and perform again."

But he says that journey hasn't left them any more or less confident about their chances of making a true impact in this year's championship. The recall of Dessie Farrell and Ian Robertson along the way has added some stability, but as a team they're still operating on the same level.

"Well, I felt we were as confident as we needed to be going in against Westmeath. And I still feel we were capable of winning that day. As it transpired we didn't win it, and so you have to look at the reasons why.

"You think you might have fixed some problems, but you don't know until you come out the next day. But any of the fixing we have done to date has got us by the test that was there. Roscommon now will be another step up, but we'll just have to see how it goes."

There were moments in Portlaoise back on July 10th when Dublin looked a lot more like the team of 2002, with Alan Brogan cutting into space up front and Darren Magee the engine room at midfield. Lyons, in fact, felt they'd rediscovered their feet before that.

"Well, I thought the first half against Leitrim brought out something in the Dublin team that we haven't seen in a while. They just grounded out the performance in the driving wind and rain. Did the basics very well. And that was just as important as playing well in Croke Park.

"And I'd still like to believe that if we get a buzz going in Croke Park then it does help energise the team. But then some players get very energised by it and others can find it too much. Hopefully we'll have the balance right with the players on the field."

It's easy to say now that the qualifying route has been a blessing in disguise. But clearly it hasn't done Dublin any harm: "You do get away from the spotlight, and the media have no interest in the qualifiers. Not because they've no interest in Dublin. But if we'd drawn, say, Tyrone, it would have been another circus. That's what comes with Dublin and you just live with it. It's a fact of life that if we win on Sunday, the circus begins again."