THE MIDDLE THIRD:Dublin were hungrier and quicker – but Donegal won't give them the same space

WHEN THE rain came hammering down an hour before the Dublin v Tyrone game in Croke Park on Sunday, I started to worry I’d got this one wrong.

I had backed Dublin to win, but that weather was just so atrocious I felt Tyrone might handle it better.

I don’t know why – maybe I just associated Tyrone with having better ball players or maybe just a bunch of guys who’d been there and done it before. I can see now I was falling into the same trap as a lot of other people.

Any other team coming into this quarter-final with the form Tyrone have been showing this summer would have been rank outsiders against Dublin. Kerry played Roscommon in a challenge match above in Limerick a few weeks ago and beat them very handily and yet Tyrone needed a big 10-minute burst to pull away from Roscommon in the fourth round of the qualifiers.

Even so, this was a 50-50 game for a lot of people before throw-in. That’s a real tribute to how good Tyrone have been down the years.

But on Saturday night, it was surprising just how far off the pace Tyrone were. Dublin crowded them out and stopped them implementing their gameplan. The Dubs were hungry and fast and Tyrone couldn’t live with it.

The conditions actually suited them more than Tyrone in the end.

All I could think of sitting in the stadium was this modern game is no country for old men.

This defeat won’t take anything away from Tyrone. It won’t dilute what these players have brought to the game at all. Outside even of their three All-Ireland wins, they’ve been a great team and have provided memorable moments to all of us who watch the game.

I was sitting at home one night recently and came across their 2005 All-Ireland semi-final against Armagh on TG4. To me, that was one of the great games of the modern era. Super football, outstanding scores, real tough, enjoyable stuff. That won’t be forgotten by anyone.

But it was six years ago now and some of these Tyrone players look like they’re feeling the time passing. It’s not up to me or anybody else to decide for them that enough’s enough. They’ve been around too long and given too much to the cause to have to read some fella in the paper saying they should hang up their boots. I had that for long enough myself at the end.

Two things really struck me about Tyrone on Saturday. The first was their defence. Joe and Justin McMahon are fine footballers, but I’ve never really been convinced about them as defenders. Put it this way – if you were putting together an Ulster Railway Cup team would you have them in defence?

You’d probably have them on the team somewhere, but chances are you’d pick a Karl Lacey or a Neil Magee before them in the backs. They’ve always looked like they were put there because Tyrone had nobody else.

Now, when Tyrone were full of running and playing a helter-skelter game out the field, that was fine. They were able to protect their full-back line by making it incredibly difficult to get the ball into that area of the pitch. They defended out the field in twos and threes to made sure the boys inside weren’t exposed too often.

When we faced them in the 2008 final, the level of intensity they put in to stop scores was exhausting to play against. Conor Gormley was playing on the Gooch that day, but he wasn’t playing him on his own. He had help out the field and help in front of him. Every score we got in that game, we really had to work for. And by God we felt it.

That’s what Dublin did to Tyrone on Saturday. They got out in front, they hunted in packs, they made it so that when a Tyrone player got on the ball, all he saw ahead of him was blue jerseys. And when their defenders had to deal with Diarmuid Connolly and the two Brogans man-to-man, they got cleaned out. Croke Park is very unforgiving like that. There’s nothing a man-marker likes less than facing those wide-open spaces with no protection in front of him.

The other thing that stood out for me about the way Dublin approached the game was in midfield. When they went for the throw-in, Kevin Hughes went on Denis Bastick and Seán Cavanagh went on Michael Dara Macauley.

That would have suited Tyrone. Bastick is very game and very honest, but he’s a Kevin Hughes-type player. Hughes would relish a good physical battle against him. But straight away after the throw-in, Bastick went and attached himself to Cavanagh.

When someone is determined to mark you in midfield, it can throw you off your game. Generally, midfielders will just get on with playing their own game and trying to work out what they can contribute to it. It’s rare enough you find somebody trying to mark you out of it and it only happens to the better players, the more creative ones. Cavanagh is one of those and Dublin obviously sent Bastick to do a job on him.

And it worked. Bastick horsed into him and marked him like a wing back would have. Cavanagh was pretty anonymous, which I found quite disappointing. Someone of his ability needs to come through a test like that.

Bastick wore him down and stopped him having an affect on the game and the upshot was it made for a real psychological blow to Tyrone. Cavanagh was the one who stood up and drove them on when things were tight against Roscommon but he wasn’t able to do the same thing against the Dubs.

All in all, it was a great performance from Dublin. I don’t remember them losing a 50-50 challenge all night. Their foot-passing was especially impressive in the wet weather, as they kicked balls into their team-mates’ hands rather than skidding them on the ground. And once again, the affect Stephen Cluxton had on the game was immense.

I would genuinely put him up there as one of Dublin’s three most important players now. His distribution from kick-outs dictated the game. I’ve never seen a goalkeeper influence the way a team plays this much in 30 years.

When teams prepare for Dublin, they draw up plans for the Brogans – and after Saturday night, they’ll be drawing up plans for Diarmuid Connolly – but unless you have your homework done on Cluxton, you will not have a chance of beating them.

He is where it all starts so he has to be where you start when you go about trying to stop them. You have to press forward and cut out the space in front of him. You have to be so switched on and so careful at all times when he has the ball. He thinks nothing of throwing a ball down and pinging a 50-yard kick on to someone’s chest without a run-up. This guy is a serious footballer.

He has to be because when it goes wrong, it looks dreadful. Pascal McConnell tried a few short ones on Saturday night and got caught out and paid the price for it. But Cluxton rarely seems to make a mess of one. You have to have serious balls to keep doing what he’s doing. It sets Dublin apart from all the other teams in the country because their goalkeepers can’t do what he’s doing with this sort of consistency.

In saying that, it was obvious who would get man of the match on Saturday. Diarmuid Connolly kicked seven points from play and grabbed all the headlines. Some of them were great scores, really confident kicks that were beautiful to watch. There was one in particular in the first half off his left foot that was just sublime. You get nights like that when you have the talent he has and the best of luck to him.

But I wouldn’t be reading too much into it just yet. I’d love to see how he does against a better defence. Donegal will close down the space and stop him playing with such freedom. And I’ll be interested to see how he gets on on a day when the ball doesn’t run for him.

He played against Kerry two years ago and the first ball he got, he skinned Tomás Ó Sé before smacking a brilliant shot off the crossbar. If it had gone in, it would have been one of the goals of the season but it bounced away clear. And after that, his head just dropped.

That happens to some players. I’ve seen plenty of confidence players down the years, fellas who are highly skilful but can sometimes let an early miss or mistake get to them. All you can do is try to bring their talent out of them. You try to gear the game around them, get them on the ball.

You go in and speak to the other forwards when there’s a break in play and make sure the ball goes to them and that nobody’s not passing to them because they think their head is gone. You try not to be sending in 50-50 ball but rather you try to tee it up almost. Because if you can get a player like that into the game, get him believing, then the sky’s the limit sometimes. You just have to coax it out of them.

I saw Jimmy McGuinness and Rory Gallagher at the game on Saturday and you can be sure they’ll have their homework done. You can be guaranteed neither Connolly nor Cluxton will see the same amount of space in front of them in the semi-final. Dublin are moving the ball at a great tempo and are playing a lovely brand of football. But there are chinks in their armour too.

Look at the damage Stephen O’Neill did in the short time he was on the pitch. He could have ended the game with 1-2 or 1-3 to his name. And he didn’t do anything too special apart from making some clever runs and finding the posts when he shot. Michael Murphy and Colm McFadden are well capable of doing the same. I would still question just how good Dublin are against a team that crowds them out.

Donegal will do that and I wouldn’t see anything wrong with it at all. Neither Donegal nor Mayo will get any criticism here for how they set up in the two semi-finals. These are huge journeys those two teams are on and the last thing they should do now is change their style just because they’re in the semi-final. They have to believe they can go and win the All Ireland now and do it their own way.

Because it’s a long, long way back to this point. The year my club, An Ghaeltacht, got beaten in the All-Ireland final on St Patrick’s Day, I remember thinking afterwards that the distance back to the final the next year was huge. It’s not like getting close to the top of the mountain and then starting from halfway up the next time.

You go right back down to the start, like a game of snakes and ladders.

That’s why players keep playing.

People would have looked at that Tyrone team on Saturday and wondered why some of them were still putting themselves through it. The answer is very simple – they still thought they could win an All-Ireland. They looked around the dressingroom, saw men who’d done it before, saw a manager who’d done it before, saw some good young players in the mix and decided they’d be starting from further up the mountain than most other teams.

The very same happened to me in my last year with Kerry. I could easily have taken my seat in the stand, but I was able to look around the dressingroom and see Declan O’Sullivan and Colm Cooper and Paul Galvin there.

So I was selfish about it. I said to myself, “These boys will win me another All-Ireland medal.”

If I’d thought they were going to be also-rans, I’d have packed it in earlier.

So I wouldn’t hold it against any of the Tyrone players who stayed on.

Not one bit.