Dublin duo’s return can be good news for the Kingdom
Colm Keys
September 20 2022 02:30 AM
As a past master of regeneration himself, Jack O’Connor will surely have admired his counterpart Dessie Farrell’s success in creating the ground for Jack McCaffrey and Paul Mannion’s return to inter-county football in the months ahead.
O’Connor has always been loath to let a player go, much less drift away when there was potentially more to be extracted from them.
Mike McCarthy was his most celebrated renewal project, McCarthy’s mid-season 2009 return to fulfil a role as the team’s centre-back, rather than corner-back where he was routinely posted in an initial spell with Kerry that had ended three years earlier, was one of the sparks that transformed that particular season.
William Kirby, brought back into the fold in his first year in charge of Kerry, 2004, was another that worked out well.
In McCarthy’s case, O’Connor recognised the need for a composed figure at the heart of a defence that was somewhat chaotic in losing to Cork in a Munster replay earlier in the summer. Kirby was the perfect midfield outrider for Darragh Ó Sé in 1997 and again in 2004.
Mechanics
The return of Mannion and McCaffrey now, though, is as important to Dublin for the statement it makes as it is for the mechanics of what they will potentially bring to the game.
McCaffrey’s pace and effervescence and Mannion’s elegant movement and kicking will be a welcome sight for Dublin supporters but also for the game in general to have them back on the biggest stage.
They are two of the players of their generation and provided they can find their feet quickly, they’ll add so much.
The greater risk is perhaps attached to McCaffrey, given that by the start of next year’s league it will be three-and-a-half years since he last played a full match for Dublin, ironically the drawn All-Ireland final against Kerry in 2019 when he scored 1-3 from wing-back in an individual performance for the ages.
In between, he’s had half an All-Ireland final replay (replaced by Diarmuid Connolly at half-time due to injury) and a brief involvement in a league game against Tyrone the following spring.
But even if he was to lose a ‘yard’ of that scintillating speed that has framed his game, he’d still be among the quickest out there.
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Mannion did feature in Farrell’s first year, off the bench in the championship, and was pivotal on the night they won their sixth successive All-Ireland title in succession. But in the two years since, the absence of both players has cast something of a shadow over Dublin, not one that blotted out the light completely but which reached far enough to suggest that not everything could be right.
How could two players who had come through the development system under the very manager at the head of affairs now not commit to him and his team when his time came?
Of course, both McCaffrey and Mannion are independent-minded people with a broad range of interests that stretched way beyond football but some had trouble accepting that they had simply tired of the commitment and routine that the inter-county game requires.
Their return now removes that shadow and even if their powers of old are somewhat diminished and not at their 2017-2019 levels as they edge towards their 30th years, it still feels like it will be a much more ‘locked and loaded’ Dublin squad going into 2023 championship.
The absence of that veneer of completion will have inevitably rankled within the squad, which would inevitably have found it hard, at times, to move on in the knowledge that two of their best, and two good friends to many within, were away from it as they entered their prime years. A piece of them missing, essentially, especially those from the ‘class of 1993’.
Given their close ties to so many still in the squad, it’s hard to imagine that player persuasion wasn’t a factor in the return of both.
As good as it is for Dublin and the 2023 championship, there are also benefits for the current champions and the chasing pack too.
This potentially raises everyone’s game and an early guardrail for any slack that might be setting in with Kerry.
With their defensive parsimony throughout the year and wondrous magic of David Clifford, it is without doubt that they were the best team out there in 2022. Yet it took that kick from Seán O’Shea to avoid extra-time with a Dublin team that didn’t have Con O’Callaghan in this year’s All-Ireland semi-final.
Success
With O’Callaghan intact, the All-Ireland title race may well have taken a different course. We’ll never know and while it doesn’t detract much from Kerry’s outright success, it is still a point of curiosity.
A Kerry team in a much earlier stage of its development came close to derailing Dublin’s five-in-a-row bid in that drawn All-Ireland final in 2019 and was in lockstep with them in the replay until Eoin Murchan’s intervention – his goal immediately on the restart of the second half. And that Dublin team had Mannion, McCaffrey and O’Callaghan.
Inevitably, with a weight lifted from their own shoulders, Kerry will be better for it next year. But another potential meeting with Dublin now raises the stakes even more.
Rather than recoil from their return, Kerry and the rest of the immediate chasing pack will embrace Farrell’s reassembly of the old band again.
As much as ending their respective winless championship sequences against Dublin thrilled both Mayo and Kerry in back-to-back All-Ireland semi-finals, doing it against a team with two of its brightest talents back in harness would inevitably mean more and thus a greater prize is up for grabs in 2023.
