If Ger Gilroy is not interested in praising Dublin than why is he they're number cheerleader on there? They might be proud Kildare men but as I acknowledged on my post this goes on despite what county they are from. The fact is they know what side their bread is buttered. A Dublin based media station will never survive asking hard questions about Dublin GAA, regardless of how valid they are. If they did, they'd be no Paddy podcast, no Brendan Brogan podcast,no Philly on to talk about his good charity work. No exclusive interview with Jim
We probably need to be moving on from this as we are paying far more attention to OTB than is justified. But Gilroy has consistently stuck the knife into Dublin when the opportunity arose. Eg; after this years semi he basically said they were poor losers who engaged in thuggish behaviour. It's a different debate whether he was right or wrong but the fact is if he was pandering to Dublin he would not have said this. Btw on occasions I've heard him praise Dublin but he'd be a proper ostrich if he didn't acknowledge their achievements.
Bernard is the most media savvy of the lot. That's his job and no surprise if he is landing the odd gig with OTB.
Paddy Andrews & Andy Moran gig is excellent and has taken on a life of it's own now. Good stuff this week from both lads, Andy about importance of Sigerson while Paddy talked about self analysis and why talent alone is not enough. Great listen for aspiring young lads.
How is yer own winter of discontent going?
Any sign of Dessie being over thrown?
..........
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Covid breach, bad vibes and missing stars - inside the downfall of the Dubs
A year that began with dreams of a magnificent seven has ended with the fallen All-Ireland champions mired by doubts, both on and off the pitch. As Dessie Farrell sifts through the wreckage of a difficult second season, we analyse where it all went wrong and ask can Dublin bounce back in 2022?
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Frank Roche
October 09 2021 02:30 AM
Brian Malone can remember the build-up to Wexford’s first – and last – foray into the 2021 senior football championship bearpit.
“I was expecting a hurricane with Dublin coming to town. I thought we were going to be under savage pressure,” he recounts. “We were in Division 4 and, in the league, we’d lost to Carlow and Waterford. So then, when you have the six-time All-Ireland champions coming to town, you’re thinking, ‘Jesus, you could be in trouble here!’
“But we were in the game for pretty much the whole game, in striking distance,” he continues. “Yeah, I just felt they were very flat. Having played them over the years, they were always high energy, high tempo, very powerful, all the things you’d expect – but that just didn’t appear in Wexford Park.
“They just had a plan and they stuck to it, and they were so rigid … and it just made it, not easy for us, but easier than what we expected.”
Dublin eventually won by 0-15 to 0-7. If it were any other All-Ireland contender, you would probably dismiss it as an opening-day bout of burning off the dirty diesel. But this was Dublin: all-conquering Dublin.
During their six-year monopoly of Sam Maguire, they had won their first provincial outings by margins of 27, 11, 12, 23, 26 and 11. The Dubs didn’t do single digits – not in Leinster, at any rate.
Until now.
It’s easier, at a three-month remove and with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, to view Dublin’s fitful Wexford display as a sign of things to come.
If they had rediscovered their mojo and gone on to record a magnificent seven, we wouldn’t give that match a second’s thought.
Instead, as they surrendered a seven-point lead to Mayo, culminating in a morass of defensive dithering, turnovers and black cards, Dublin found themselves in a dark place they hadn’t visited for seven years. Only this unravelling was worse than Donegal 2014.
Was this really the end of an era?
THE BAD VIBES
There were other indicators in Wexford Park that things weren’t quite right. This was the day Dessie Farrell told the world of Stephen Cluxton’s ‘non-retirement retirement’.
“He’s asked for time and I think he deserves the time,” said Farrell. “When a man asks to step away and take time out, I think a player like Stephen Cluxton deserves that.”
Still, news that the most decorated skipper and most capped player in Gaelic football history wasn’t available – even though he had not officially called time on his inter-county career – left a jarring impression.
It brought a degree of clarity – the message was immediately decoded as tacit confirmation that the 39-year-old goalkeeper would not be around for the rest of summer, whatever slim chance remained of a 2022 return.
But it also fuelled a growing suspicion that, inside the Dublin bubble, the old certainties were starting to fray.
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That bubble had been close to impenetrable through the Jim Gavin years of unparalleled success – and beyond. The outside world, media especially, were fed a starvation diet of vague injury updates and interview soundbites that told us next to nothing.
In this vacuum of information, and given the inscrutable touchline demeanour of recent and current Dublin managers, all we could do was study the unfolding narrative between the white lines for clues … and then try and separate truth from outlandish rumour whenever ‘stories’ occasionally circulated on the Dublin grapevine.
But this year, even before Wexford Park, there were ominous hints both on and more especially off the pitch.
The secret dawn training session at Innisfails GAA Club on March 31 – attended by at least nine players, in clear breach of Covid-19 guidelines, and revealed by the Irish Independent – proved a spectacular own goal.
It led to a swift internal investigation, a mea culpa from Dublin’s management team and a 12-week ban for Farrell, a punishment later superseded by a similar suspension from the GAA’s Management Committee.
It meant Dublin had to play a truncated Allianz League campaign without any input from their manager. Did his absence from the training ground, let alone on match-days, have a longer-term negative impact? We’re dabbling in the realms of speculation, but it scarcely qualified as a positive.
On a practical level, Dublin’s punishment for ‘Innisfailsgate’ also incorporated the loss of home advantage for one league game – that thrilling stalemate with Kerry, switched to Thurles.
This match reminded us of Dublin’s capacity for plunder: Con O’Callaghan and Cormac Costello shared four goals between them. But it also offered an early-season portent of Dublin’s new-found vulnerability: when Peter Keane’s team pressed higher and harder in the second half, they created the opportunities to erase a seven-point deficit.
At the final bell, these arch-rivals were inseparable … as they would be when the league concluded in incomplete fashion, Dublin and Kerry sharing the Division 1 title in the absence of any calendar space to play a final.
But after that underwhelming championship opener in the south-east, news broke ahead of Dublin’s Leinster semi-final against Meath that Eric Lowndes had left the panel.
Lowndes has never fully established his starting credentials since arriving on the senior scene in 2014, but he has been an important squad member who saw his fair share of game-time, including All-Ireland cameos in 2016 and ’18.
His departure came at the very time that Farrell was grappling with a defensive injury crisis that left him without John Small, Eoin Murchan and Robbie McDaid for the looming visit of Meath.
THE BARREN BLUES
By half-time against Meath, there appeared little reason to panic. Dublin led by 2-11 to 0-6. O’Callaghan already had 1-3 in brackets, all from play. The game was as good as over …
Fast-forward to the 68th minute: Dublin are hanging onto a three-point lead. Was the unthinkable about to happen?
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It didn’t, thanks to a prolonged bout of ‘keep ball’ culminating in Brian Fenton’s fisted point in stoppage time.
But that second half fadeout had been alarming, all the same. Dublin had failed to score for 14 minutes on the resumption, and then for over 18 minutes before Fenton’s relieving score. This mirrored a 16-minute barren period in the first half against Wexford … these famines would ultimately come back to haunt the team against Mayo, when they failed to score in the third quarter and only tallied 0-4 from half-time until the end of extra-time.
In truth, even during the peak years under Gavin, Dublin were no longer the swashbucklers they had been in 2013 and ’14. But their careful husbandry of possession had now morphed from a strength to a weakness.
Another tell-tale statistic: Dublin totalled just two goals in four SFC contests this year. Remove that first-half outlier against Meath, and you are left with seven halves plus another 20 minutes of extra-time devoid of green flags. Was it a case that the greatest team ever had become – whisper it – predictable?
“I know from playing them years ago, they would have played a lot more off-the-cuff,” says Brian Malone.
“They would have taken on a lot more 50-50 passes and they were a lot more dangerous. Whereas now they’re so systematic. You knew kind of what they were going to do.
“It doesn’t mean you can always stop it, with their pace and power, but you can prepare for it. And they just kind of wore us down eventually but, like, they never threatened a goal … and we’ve never done that against Dublin, they’ve always got goals.”
Fifteen years after making his SFC debut, Malone was now a 35-year-old playing wing-back against the Dubs and thinking, “Jesus, I could be under savage pressure here. And it didn’t appear like that. I was probably more comfortable playing this year against Dublin than any of the other years when I was ten years younger.”
How much different might it have been if Jack McCaffrey (in June 2020) and Paul Mannion (last January) hadn’t stepped away while still in their prime? Potentially quite a lot, given their explosive pace and dynamism, let alone blue-chip ball-playing talents.
Yet, according to Malone, Dublin’s problems appeared to run deeper.
“There’s some years, for whatever reason, you’re just flat. You can never really get it going. And I just felt Dublin would definitely be caught this year,” the Wexford defender says.
“You mentioned those lads that are obviously huge losses, but they still have guys there with savage pace and power. But I just don’t think they’re really allowed to express themselves.
“Like, if you go back to Paul Flynn and Diarmuid Connolly in the half-forward line. Every time they used to get the ball, they’d look up and would take on these audacious passes. And a lot of the times they didn’t come off; but when they did, they led to goals. And they’re just not allowed to do that now, it seems. They’re just sticking to the plan and just wearing teams down.”
RETIREMENTS, DEFECTIONS AND A DWINDLING PLAN B
Queries about Farrell’s coaching ticket have grown louder in the wake of the Mayo defeat, fuelled by the apparent erosion of the team’s ability to penetrate. His management team comprises Mick Galvin (who stepped into the hot-seat during Farrell’s suspension), Brian O’Regan, Darren Daly and Shane O’Hanlon, who overseas logistics as he did under Gavin.
There have been pointed comparisons to the input of Declan Darcy and Jason Sherlock, who played such pivotal coaching roles during the previous regime – and suggestions that Farrell now needs to add another layer of expertise.
But there’s another more fundamental issue that has hastened Dublin’s fall from the heights of a six-in-a-row.
Put bluntly, they have lost far too much quality too quickly.
Here’s a roll call of retirements since Paul Flynn called time on May 1, 2019, ahead of Dublin’s successful Drive for Five: Bernard Brogan (October ’19), Darren Daly and then Diarmuid Connolly (September ’20), Paddy Andrews and Michael Darragh Macauley (January ’21), Cian O’Sullivan (June ’21).
Such attrition is inevitable with players in their thirties carrying such high mileage. Other veterans like Philly McMahon (who saw limited action this year) and Kevin McManamon (who was in Tokyo with the Irish Olympic boxing squad and didn’t feature at all) are very much on the last inter-county lap.
But it doesn’t end there: McCaffrey, Mannion, Cluxton and Lowndes have all exited the squad without signalling retirement.
Mannion is now 28 – and currently shooting the lights out with Kilmacud Crokes, including a 0-8 (5f) haul against St Vincent’s in their most recent Dublin SFC group game. Last June, the three-time All-Star spoke of his desire to spend time on other things in his life, how over the last year he had lost “that bit of balance” and had found the inter-county commitment “pretty heavy”.
There have been (still totally unconfirmed) rumblings of a possible inter-county comeback for Mannion; observers are surmising that it’s more likely than a return for McCaffrey, who is about to turn 28.
The underlying narrative is that Dublin will struggle to recapture lost glories unless all of their best players are available.
Even if one or both of these marquee talents were to resurface, it’s undeniable that Dublin’s current squad pales by comparison to their peak version, probably in 2017 when they completed the three-in-a-row after that epic decider against Mayo.
The subs used that day? Flynn, Connolly, McManamon, Brogan, one relative novice in Niall Scully and Cormac Costello, their super-sub hero from 2016. Between them you could count one former Footballer of the Year (Brogan), ten All-Star awards and, at that juncture, 19 Celtic Crosses.
And guess who didn’t even see game-time that day? Macauley, another former Footballer of the Year.
Contrast this with Dublin’s back-up arsenal against Mayo last August: Colm Basquel, Tom Lahiff, Seán Bugler, Seán MacMahon, Philly McMahon (by far the most decorated sub), a fit-again McDaid and Aaron Byrne. All fine players in their own right; but the depth of talent and more especially experience is simply no longer there.
Can Dublin turn it around? Yes – if their first-teamers and more particularly their pillars all stay around, remain fit and regain their old tunnel-visioned focus. John Small, Fenton and Ciarán Kilkenny are all 28; Costello and David Byrne are 27; O’Callaghan and Eoin Murchan are 25; Brian Howard is 24. Evan Comerford, at 23, is already an elite ’keeper, for all the inevitable comparisons with the peerless Cluxton.
But for Dublin to rebound in 2022, they will remain reliant not just on all the above but on their surviving thirtysomething linchpins: Mick Fitzsimons (34 next April), Jonny Cooper (32 next month) and especially James McCarthy (32 in March).
Can they do it? Dublin great Paul Curran isn’t ruling it out. “I won’t call it the end, but the stop was always going to happen. I thought it might be Kerry, but Kerry have been caught the last couple of years,” says the 1995 All-Ireland winner and Texaco Footballer of the Year.
“But look, there’s still plenty of quality there. I know the quality of person as well – they’re intelligent fellas, they’ll give it everything again. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if they rallied next year and go close.”
Brian Malone echoes that point. “I think Dublin are going to come strong again next year. The fact that people’s eyes are off them a small bit will definitely help them, because they still do have brilliant players,” the Wexford man stresses. “You probably do need to bring in a bit of fresh blood and change things up a bit – but, like, they have the personnel to do that.”
Whatever happens when the Fenton/Kilkenny generation slip away, several years from now, could be a different and even more troubling question – especially given Dublin’s latter-day dearth of stellar graduates from the underage ranks.
But that debate can wait. If there is to be a Dublin backlash, expect it sooner rather than later.
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