Football Championship 2014 Preview

How good are Dublin right now? They’re so good that it’s actually frightening to list their advantages. Send the children out to play, pull the curtains, maybe take a strong drink for your nerves. Here we go.

Firstly, Dublin are in the extraordinary position of being both greater than the sum of their parts, and of having parts that are pretty dang good in the first place. Diarmuid Connolly can win games on his own. Michael Darragh MacAuley, the ultimate twenty-first century footballer, can win games on his own. No inter-county player has ever improved as much as Eoghan O’Gara has between now and when he first burst onto the scene. And so on, and so on.

Secondly, Dublin have home advantage in every game they play. If anything, it’s a double advantage in that their home (and don’t talk about Parnell Park – when was the last time Dublin played a Championship game in Parnell Park?) is the most sacred turf in the entire Gaelic Athletic Association.

Thirdly, the Leinster Championship is currently the worst it’s ever been. It’s 9/1 the field for someone other than Dublin to win the Delaney Cup this summer. If you took the pick of the other ten counties competing, could they keep it kicked out to Dublin? Probably not.

Fourthly, Dublin’s evisceration of Roscommon in this year’s Under-21 football final suggested that Dublin don’t so much have a pipeline of talent coming through as a torrential flood that will wash away all before it. Pat Spillane said on the TV last year that Dublin could dominate football for the next 25 years.

And at that, suddenly, a chink of light. For Dublin to dominate for the next 25 years means that Pat Spillane must be correct in his analysis, and such a thing simply cannot be.

Every dominant team looks unbeatable in its dominance. Until they are beaten, and then suddenly people say well, I was never sure about this, or they were never tested in terms of that, or one hundred and one other things. Barcelona in the soccer this year. The mighty cats of Kilkenny in the hurling last year. There are no unbeatable teams.

In his book Hurling: The Revolution Years, Denis Walsh recounts how Liam Griffin prepared his Wexford hurlers to play Offaly in the 1996 Leinster Final. Offaly were the Leinster kingpins at that time, having played in the last two All-Ireland Finals, winning one, while Wexford had lost sixteen finals in a row, between Leinster and the National League.

Liam Griffin, the Wexford manager, knew that you can’t just pretend those beatings didn’t happen. He hired a psychologist, Niamh Fitzpatrick, to see what she could do to fight the negativity that hung in the air. And it was her idea to ask every member of the Wexford panel to name a reason why Wexford could beat Offaly on Sunday in the team meeting after Wednesday training.

For the first five minutes, there was absolute silence in the room. It was a very long five minutes for Fitzpatrick, who worried that if her idea backfired, it would ruin the team and they’d be butchered.

And then, someone spoke. Fitzpatrick wrote the idea down on a flipchart. Someone else spoke. That idea went down too. By the end of the night, the flipchart had thirty ideas on it, thirty ways by which Wexford could beat Offaly. Liam Dunne went home and told his mother that night that Sunday would be dressed in purple and gold. And so it came to pass.

Are Dublin unbeatable? No, they’re not. It’s just a question of pinpointing what Dublin’s key strengths are, and neutralising them. Easier said than done, of course, but very far from impossible.

Dublin’s empire is built Stephen Cluxton’s precision kickouts, as they guarantee Dublin a constant flow of position. That flow of possession has to be stopped, by whatever means necessary within the rules and the spirit of the game.

Next, a team has to think about MacAuley, Dublin’s fulcrum. MacAuley is central processing unit of Dublin’s imperium. He is Mr Everywhere. Everything goes through him. He’s got to be stopped. And stopping him will hurt, so teams have to be ready to pay that price. Because once MacAuley starts to struggle, the entire team will start to struggle with him.

And then there’s Diarmuid Connolly, the best of a genuinely superb set of forwards. If Connolly gets warmed up he is the best footballer in Ireland, and therefore he cannot be allowed to warm up in the first place.

If your correspondent were to choose any Mayoman of past or present to mark Connolly, I would choose Anthony “Larry” Finnerty. This seems odd, as Finnerty spent his whole career as a corner forward. But when taking on a super-power you have do as Wexford did, and think outside the box.

Finnerty was never a back and probably couldn’t mark a bingo board, but he is one of the wittiest men ever to play Gaelic football. Finnerty’s job would be to keep Connolly apprised of how he’s doing in this particular game, and of other matters pertaining to the city and the world in a constant flow of repartee. This will bring extra pressure on the other five defenders of course, but shutting Connolly down will be worth it.

And as well as all this, of course, your own players have to play like gods – all the above does is reduce Dublin from the Olympian to the merely excellent. But events can build their own momentum, and once the camel gets his nose into the tent, you’d be surprised how quickly the rest of him arrives in afterwards.

So, if not Dublin, who? Is the team that beats Dublin the automatic All-Ireland winner? Yes, of course, if it happens in the final. Not necessarily, if it happens earlier. A team could be spent having beaten Dublin, while all the others up their game, seeing daylight where there was once only the jeering of the Hill. Which means that we can divide up the contenders into those who could beat Dublin and take advantage, those who could beat Dublin only to get beat themselves, and those who could inside track it, and seize a chance left by Dublin’s exit.

There has never been a better team at picking up All-Irelands than Kerry, but whether the current Kerry could beat Dublin – and they want to beat Dublin very, very much – is open to question. Kerry are in a better position to replace the Gooch than any other team and they have an excellent midfield, but the backs are raw and that could cost them. Kerry are never to be ruled out, however.

Cork or Donegal could beat Dublin in theory, but it’s not that likely. Cork need a little seasoning while Donegal are on the slide – it was an impossible dream that the McGuinness lustre would last.

Monaghan could beat Dublin but might not win the All-Ireland. Derry can’t beat Dublin but could win the All-Ireland. Tyrone are the best value bet, having the confidence recent All-Irelands brings, the youth coming onstream and the best manager of his generation, if not the best ever. A lot depends on their up-and-coming players, of course, but if it’s in them, Mickey Harte will find it.

And Mayo? Well. Tune in tomorrow, friends.

Joe Brolly and the Problem of Perspective

Joe Brolly is misunderstood. Much of this is his own fault, of course. He wants to be misunderstood. There is an impish streak in Brolly. He finds it extremely hard to resist divilment. We saw it during his playing career, when he blew kisses to the crowd after scoring a goal. We see it now again on the Sunday Game, when puts a match to a stick of dynamite and then pretends to be surprised at the resulting explosion.

Brolly’s attitude is fundamentally different to the other agents provacateurs on the RTÉ Sports payroll. Eamon Dunphy and George Hook are professional irritants. They have made such names as they have by insisting that black is white and holding firm on that belief in the face of facts or evidence.

Dunphy and Hook have to do it because, if they were to lose the punditry gig, it’s not like Google or Facebook would come running to get them to write a few yards of Java or C++. Brolly is different; Brolly is a QC. He doesn’t need the pundit gig. He does it because he likes it. He does it because there’s a part of him that craves the attention. It’s the same part that made him blow the kisses, even when he knew his corner-back was likely to take the gesture the wrong way.

Brolly is different too in his attitude to the game on which expounds. Hook and Dunphy claim to be great lovers of the game, and make much of having seen an exceptional display by a brontosaurus at stand-off half/the hole behind the front two back in old God’s time, and it’s a perpetual disappointment to both men that none of these modern Jessies can fill that brontosaurus’s admittedly enormous boots.

Brolly doesn’t really do that schtick. Brolly talks about football and he knows about football but he keeps it in its context, as only a game. As only one part of the rich tapestry of life. And Brolly’s donation of a kidney to someone he hardly knew last year is proof that Brolly does see the big picture and, in that big picture, surely walks with the angels.

Unfortunately, the big picture is problematic for the Mayo football public. Mayo can only see two things – Sam, and bleak and utter hopelessness. Nothing else. Sam they’ve seen on the telly. Bleak and utter hopelessness they live with every day.

Big picture wise, Brolly is correct. Football is only a game. But equally, Brolly can see the big picture because he was sated during his football career. Some believe the Derry team of the early 1990s should have won more than one All-Ireland but at least they did win that one All-Ireland. Joe knows what it’s like to be an All-Ireland Champion. He has that warmth to temper and add perspective to his views, to help him relax.

Mayo people know no such temperament. All they know is the Fiend. The Fiend that visits every night and whispers “if only he’d sent off McDermott … if only someone had levelled Lacey … if only this fella had done that … if only that fella had done this.” If, if, if.

Martin “Glory” Storey, hero of the Model County, was profiled on Laochra Gael some years ago. In the early ‘nineties, the Wexford hurlers couldn’t win a raffle. They lost sixteen finals in a row, between Leinster and the National League. The National Leagues, if anything, were worse, because it’s not like anybody cares who wins it. But Wexford couldn’t even manage to win a title nobody wanted, reaching a nadir in 1993 when they took Cork to two replays and still couldn’t fall over the line.

Storey was smiling as he reminisced about those finals. But Storey wasn’t smiling because he’d been talking to Joe and reading Kipling and treating triumph and disaster just the same. After those sixteen loses, Storey’s Wexford finally did win Leinster in 1996, and then went onto to win the All-Ireland.

Storey’s smile may have been partly due to bonhomie and good will to all, but your correspondent will bet Grafton Street against a two-bed apartment in Gorey that Storey’s particular smile was fueled by the presence of a little celtic cross in the dresser, on the wall or inside the hip pocket. Just like the one Joe Brolly himself has.

Without that celtic cross, would Storey have been so wry in his reminiscences? Would he have spoken so easily about all those finals? Or would his haunted and hollowed out look be like that one most Mayo men see in the mirror on the fourth Monday in September?

The people of Mayo would like to look on those twin imposters, triumph and disaster, just the same. But they really need to triumph before they can realistically compare it to the disaster they’re all too familiar with, and that hasn’t quite clicked yet. So, if their outlook seems especially gloomy, if they seem particularly irritated by Joe Brolly in a way they shouldn’t, reader, forgive them. They have no other cheek left to turn.

The Real Reason that Mayo Lost to Derry in Ballina

It was naïve of the people to Mayo to think that Mr Louis Walsh could be named to the impossible honour of Mayo Person of the Year without expecting some sort of karmic retribution. And it is only through the influence of the otherworldly that we can explain the events of the Mayo v Derry game in Ballina on Sunday.

In the light of that traumatic defeat, the Mayo football public can only hope that the gods will settle for Sunday’s cuff around the ear, rather than the worrying prospect that they intend to take satisfaction all year from the Heather County for having such peculiar values as to appoint as the Mayo Person in excelsis a man whose qualifications for that honour at are not at all obvious.

How innocent of their inevitable doom were the home support in Ballina as the crowd gratefully watched the teams assemble for the throw-in – it can be a long winter without football. Mayo got off to a cracking start, horsing ball into Barry Moran at full-forward where Moran was making himself busy. They support play was a little lacking, but it was early days. Derry struggled with the new rules, and found three of their starters sent to the line with yellow cards before half-time. Mayo could not lose from there.

But meanwhile, far above in the great beyond, the huge wheel of fate turned. Any people that make a hero out of Louis Walsh deserves all they get, and they got it in spades in Ballina Sunday.

After the success of feeding Barry Moran in the first ten minutes the big Castlebar Mitchell saw nary a ball for the next hour. The Derry substitutes, particularly Uimhir a Fiche Cúig, who was not even listed on the program, cleaned up all around him. And when Mayo couldn’t get the ball out of their own half and were fading, fading, fading on the heavy sod of the bleak midwinter, who arrived to save the day? A blackberry smeared gasúr and C-Mort. Mission impossible. Thanks boss, and good luck.

An Spailpín doesn’t get upset about the league, being a man who takes the long view. It was a bad day at the office, but there’s a long time between February and the Championship where a lot of things can happen yet. But your faithful and nerve-shattered correspondent does have one suggestion however.

It is the belief of this blog that Mister Walsh and whatever class of a gobbaloo voted for him as the finest example of the Mayo Person living in 2009 be sent out to Clare Island, home of Gráinne Uí Mháille herself, Banríon Mhór na nGadaithe Mara, and locked in a bothán out there listening to Westlife’s Flying Without Wings on a constant loop until they fully repented.

Mayo’s next day out in the League is on St Valentine’s Night at Ballybofey in the County Donegal. High above the earthly sphere, the gods make their plans. We can only wait, and cower.






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