'We learnt to win in a very ugly way'

GAELIC GAMES:FOR SOMEONE who had helped orchestrate Dublin's 50th Leinster football title Pat Gilroy looked a worried man, with a worried mind. That's what happens when a team both fails to impress and very nearly failed altogether, although our line of questioning can't have helped.

Why Pat, did you take off all your full-forward line? Lucky goal Pat, wasn’t it? What Pat, if anything, did you learn from this? “Well, we learnt to win in a very ugly way,” said Gilroy, and at least that much was true.

“Sure, we didn’t perform well. We had a situation where Bernard Brogan was winning ball, getting shots off, but he’d 11 chances that he didn’t score. That’s a very unusual situation, but he wasn’t doing anything for the team, and it wasn’t going to change. Only for Eoghan O’Gara getting an injury we might have taken Bernard off a bit earlier. He is human. He’s allowed have the odd off-day, and in fairness to him he hasn’t done that for a long, long time.

“And yet the team just kept plugging away. Guys came in. and I think Barry Cahill did very well when he did, and Kevin McManamon was one of the game changers. He started to get ball and beat men, which I think was crucial for us.”

Crucial, too, perhaps was Wexford’s own goal – which brought Dublin back into it, and appeared to signal the exit signs for Wexford. “Well I think after their goal we got a couple of chances,” said Gilroy, “missed a couple of easy scores, and the goal came after that. But Wexford put us under tremendous pressure all the time when we were shooting today. And our shooting was very poor.

“I don’t think we’ve created as many chances in a game and missed as many all year.

“You don’t expect Bernard to miss the ones that he did today, but we still came out the right side of it, so we’d have to be happy with that part of it. We didn’t support maybe the guys in the full-forward line enough. A couple of times they were far too isolated, particularly in the first half.

“We got the ball into their scoring area 45 times, and 33 times we got nothing off it. So we needed to change it. It was one of those days when things weren’t running for those fellas.”

Dublin captain Bryan Cullen finished his victory speech by claiming “the season begins now” – and perhaps it does: the danger is that it might end just as quickly, if Dublin don’t deliver an improved performance in their All-Ireland quarter-final, scheduled for three weeks’ time.

“Well I said before the game no matter what happened today it wasn’t going to define our season,” said Cullen, “because there was always going to be another opportunity. So as far as we are concerned the season really starts now for us, and hopefully we have three really big games ahead of us.

“We know we have a lot to improve on and what we produced out there wouldn’t be enough to win an All-Ireland quarter-final. We have a bit to go away and work on.

“We’ve mixed emotions, obviously delighted with the win but it was a patchy performance. Some good stuff, some okay stuff and some very bad stuff at times. We are happy with the win and glad to be able to turn it around. It was a bit of a fortuitous goal but we’ll take it.

“Wexford clogged it up in front of goal and some of our shooters were a bit off with the radar at times. But we’d have been devastated had we lost that game, regardless of the back door. We want to keep winning.

“We were probably making life hard for ourselves with poor option taking and shooting from tight angles and struggled to get out in front of our men and if you don’t have those basics right then tactics go out the window.”