Lapses in concentration might not cost Dublin this evening but could prove very costly before the end of September, writes MALACHY CLERKIN

THEY’RE ALL-IRELAND champions. They haven’t lost a game in the championship since the 2010 All-Ireland semi-final. They’re 2 to 1 favourites to hoist the Sam Maguire Cup in September, having been blessed by the lighter side of the draw.

Yet ask around, shine a light into the eyes of the most fervent Dub and ponder this – does anyone believe they’re nailed on? No, they do not.

Capable of it, yes. Most likely winners, maybe. Best side? No way. Cork are longer odds going into this weekend but only because they’ve a rockier-looking road ahead of them. Handed Dublin’s draw, you wouldn’t see an offering of anything like 2/1 about Conor Counihan’s side.

Odds don’t matter and conjecture fizzles like spit on a hot pavement but this strain of uncertainty about Dublin’s ability to close out a second All-Ireland has to have its roots in something. The truth of it is every Dublin performance this summer has left room for reasonable doubt. The Louth game was against straw men and can be discarded. But against Wexford and Meath, they ended up having to lean far harder into the shovel than they ought to have, given their superiority.

On both occasions, they fell into a trap they’re well-acquainted with. They switched off. They dawdled. They let the game go ahead without them. This isn’t an observer’s thought – it’s their own diagnosis.

“It was something in the past that we definitely struggled with,” admits corner-back Michael Fitzsimons. “Against Meath you could sense we were going off the boil but you’re focusing on the game as well. We needed something to get us going and I know Stephen [Cluxton] in goal was roaring at us to get us going. It takes someone to make a big play to get you out of that lull and stop you falling back on yourselves. We can’t afford to do that to the same extent now.”

It’s an old burn with Dublin but one that Pat Gilroy seemed to have smothered last season. The outlier semi-final against Donegal aside, the Dublin team of last summer were always relentless adders to the scoreboard and in the periods where they weren’t, they made sure their opposition was becalmed as well.

Three times against Kildare in last year’s Leinster semi-final, they went more than 10 minutes without scoring. All the post-match talk that day was about the dubious free on Aindriú MacLochlainn at the end but the key to Dublin’s win was the fact they stopped Kildare scoring when they weren’t scoring themselves.

Even then, Eamonn O’Callaghan’s late goal that day was a classic switch-off score to concede – Kildare had just about punched themselves out by that stage and the Dublin defenders left him to each other as he ran through.

Gilroy had removed the worst of the virus but there were traces still left in the system. Anyone watching them against Meath in the Leinster final this time around would have cause to worry that those traces have multiplied.

Again, they went three full periods of 10 minutes apiece without scoring and in fact went almost a full 20 minutes near the end of the first half with only a point to show for it. The quick goals from Bernard Brogan and Denis Bastick just before the break made up for it.

But it was the closing period that has them on alert going into the quarter-final. With the game won and nine points between the sides on 59 minutes, they handed the game over to Meath to do with as they pleased.

They watched as Seamus McEnaney’s side put up 1-3 to get back to within a kick of a ball in a game where they had been by a stretch the lesser side.

The ease with which Dublin manufactured a fine insurance point from Brogan directly after Jamie Queeney’s goal made you wonder why they hadn’t done it before then. It’s a question that has been asked within the squad in the build-up to this evening.

“It was a bit of a relief in the end that day,” says Michael Darragh Macauley. “I suppose we did take our foot off the gas a bit and it’s something we can’t afford to do. We have to be ruthless from here on in. There’s not one team left in the competition that’s going to let us away with taking our foot off the gas. If we do it again against any other team, we’re going to get punished.

“We’re aware of that, we’ve talked about it and we’re going to have to be more ruthless in our finishing. I thought we had that last year – on the days when we were up by a few points we killed games off. That’s something we have to get back to, putting teams down when we have the chance to finish them off.

“We looked at it afterwards and there were definitely things that we could have done to stop them. They got on too much ball in the last 10 minutes and that meant they were getting through too easily and were able to get shots in. It’s definitely something we have addressed for the next game and hopefully it won’t happen again.”

Fitzsimons reckons there’s an easy enough fix. The wobble in the Meath game came down to complacency and although the possibility for more of the same is surely there against Laois, he believes forewarned is forearmed.

“We definitely did lose something in our shape against Meath. Whether that was a loss in concentration I don’t know. Maybe it was a thing that the back door was available to us. It probably takes a big player, a leader to pull us back. But we know about it now and know that we can’t afford to drop off at any stage of any game. If we do, we’ll definitely get caught out like we did against Cork two years ago. It’s weird when it happens.”

For Gilroy, the problem against Meath was, at least in part, his own fault. They made three substitutions and a blood sub in the space of 12 minutes, choking off any momentum Dublin had going and allowing Meath to get a toe into the ground. Kevin McManamon, Eamonn Fennell, Paul Flynn and Bryan Cullen were all removed (albeit only for five minutes in Flynn’s case) and it meant that Meath started picking up possession around the middle of the pitch. From there, the scores began to flow.

“I think we contributed to that,” says Gilroy, “by changing too many people in the same area too quickly and we disrupted the flow of the team. We ended up being a lot more attack-minded in that last 10 minutes than we needed to be and that was partly because of the changes we had made. We had the game well contained and I think we made too many changes in too short a space of time.”

Gilroy also pointed out on the day, some of those substitutions were forced on him by his medical staff. That could happen again and maybe the next time he won’t have a nine-point cushion to play with when it does. He accepts that a tendency to drift is in his Dublin team but says it has been dealt with.

“One thing that happened to us last year as well, we didn’t put teams away early on. In the National League final, we had an eight-point lead and lost the game. But we learned from it and I think that’s one of the things about this team – we do these things and we tend to learn quickly from them. Hopefully the same applies.”

It will have to because eventually they will come up against a side that avails of a fallow period. While it’s hard to see Laois being up to it tonight in Croke Park, Dublin are not going to get to September’s end without meeting a team that is. Until they face that team down, the doubts will linger.