'We threw the kitchen sink at it'

REACTION FROM THE DUBLIN CAMP:PAT GILROY didn't lie – at least about the levels of intensity. He said Mayo would bury them, unless Dublin met like with like, and that's exactly what happened, for about 40-odd minutes anyway.

By the time Dublin got to Mayo’s level it was game over, or was it? If Gilroy looked on nervously as Dublin closed down a seemingly impossible deficit, wondering if the All-Ireland champions would live to fight another day, he certainly wasn’t the only one: every single soul inside Croke Park wondered the same thing.

So if in the immediate aftermath Gilroy appeared more resigned by defeat than surprised by it, then perhaps it’s because he saw it coming, perhaps as early as half-time.

“Sure, everything seemed to be running against us the first 40 minutes of the game,” he said. “Anything that we tried to do was going slightly off, and we were giving away what seemed to be easy frees, and gave ourselves a mountain to climb.

“I’d still say we were quite close to Mayo’s intensity, but not quite at it . . . we put them under severe pressure, but it was too late.

“But credit to the players, they really threw everything at it . . . it’s just disappointing that we didn’t have that same bite in the first half, because we wouldn’t have been that far behind. But once a team gets to 17 or 18 points you’re really in trouble, and it really would have taken a goal in the second half if we were going to get something out of the game.”

They might well have got something out of the game had footballer of the year Alan Brogan been fit to start. And although Gilroy said during the week that he was, and indeed named him to start, Brogan was limited to a futile cameo role.

“It was just doing the warm-up,” explained the Dublin manager, “that he felt it wasn’t right, didn’t have the full power, when he gave it a really good try. We had a plan that Ciarán Kilkenny would come in, if that was the case. Alan took some painkiller, then felt he was good enough to come on, but he just couldn’t run. It was a gamble, and it backfired, but in fairness . . . it’s one of those things you have to try.”

For long periods of the first half it seemed nothing Dublin tried actually worked: they won 14 first-half kick-outs to Mayo’s eight and still gave away possession.

“In the second half we were better at holding on . . . Again, we just needed a goal to get something out of the game,” added Gilroy.

Indeed Bernard Brogan was presented with a glorious chance, but just couldn’t finish it: would that have been game over?

“At that stage we’d so much momentum that if the goal had gone in we would have been hard to stop,” lamented Gilroy, and no doubt every soul inside Croke Park would have thought the same.

As hard a way as it was to surrender their All-Ireland, it would have been incomprehensively harder had Dublin not finally found the levels of intensity that won it for them in the first place.

“Finishing the way we finished,” said Gilroy, “is at least some sort of consolation. If we’d gone out of the championship after the way we’d played in the first half, there’d be a lot of soul searching. But I don’t think defending an All-Ireland is any more difficult than winning it.

“I couldn’t fault any player for their application this year. They gave everything, even more so than last year, but it just wasn’t good enough.”

The inevitable question of whether Gilroy will be in charge to help win it back was inevitably deferred.

“I don’t know what I’m doing next week, never mind next year. Things are raw now and we’ll go away and think about it, but there are other people than me involved in that decision, other paymasters that have to be happy.”

Yet Dublin captain Bryan Cullen hinted that as a team they wouldn’t be disappearing from the main stage just yet.

“I think at the end of the first half, and start of the first half, we struggled to click into gear, and that’s when the damage was done.

“We were playing catch up from then on, but Mayo are a good side. Their game is very much possession based and that’s exactly what they did.

I’d like to think lads wanted to win just as much as last year. We threw the kitchen sink at it. But just left it a little too late,” he added.