Gilroy aiming to freshen things up

Dublin set to mix the old with new recruits as they begin the defence of their title, writes GAVIN CUMMISKEY

PAT GILROY’S fourth championship summer overseeing the Dublin footballers gets under way this Sunday against Louth. An All-Ireland title needs defending, something not even his great mentor Kevin Heffernan achieved.

Tony Hanahoe was player-manager in 1977. That success, of course, sparked Kerry into snatching the next four. Before that we must refer back to Dublin’s three-in-a-row side of 1921-23.

Gilroy, as a player, would have banked the lessons from being on the 1996 panel which failed to make a decent fist of defending the crown.

“We did lose to the eventual All-Ireland champions but only by a few points,” he countered. “Meath came from nowhere in ’96. I think we beat them by 10 points the year before.” But he also admitted the “celebrations drifted on a bit long”.

Gilroy was at Jury’s, Croke Park, before a lunch to honour the 1953 Dublin footballers. The team, which included 14 St Vincent’s players (the goalkeeper Tony O’Grady was with the Air Corps) were regarded as one which helped Gaelic football to evolve from its traditional style.

Heffernan was also present, as was Mickey Whelan, for the Association of Sports Journalists in Ireland function, sponsored by Lucozade.

Anyway, the St Vincent’s influence on Dublin football abides with Diarmuid Connolly and Ger Brennan expected to be named in today’s unusually premature team announcement. The impression is that Gilroy will go back to what we all know after a shaky league campaign.

“Other teams caught us on the hop in a few games, particularly Mayo and Down. When they got on top it was very hard to rescue the situations.

“We were trying different things and we were trying different players. As a management we probably disturbed the team a little too much when they were on a decent run at one stage.”

The absence of the Brogan brothers, Bernard and Alan, and other reliables like Barry Cahill, for large parts of the league campaign was intentional. It’s all part of Gilroy’s masterplan to be successful All-Ireland defending champions.

For starters, the team holiday was before Christmas and player functions with Sam Maguire ended in February. The other primary task was to ensure any niggly injuries were addressed before June.

“We’d be very conscious that lads go through the All-Ireland and then go playing with their clubs. Most of our guys were involved right through to early December with their clubs. If you are back to training on the first of January then that is a very long year.

“So the policy we took was that we gave people who had injuries loads of time to recover. We could have pressed Alan into service earlier, Bernard and Denis Bastick as well, but we felt ‘no, let’s try get them fully recovered and it might stand to us in the summer’.

“We have one injury in the panel, that’s Paul Brogan, for the first time all year.

“That’s one part of the story,” Gilroy continued. “The other part is that if you go out and do the same things people will have cottoned on to what you are doing so you have to bring something different to the party. Whether that’s new people or different ways of playing that’s what we’d be doing – not changing a whole pile, just a tweak here and there.”

Much like the Kilkenny hurlers, Dublin place an awful lot of stock in training games. They claim it had a lot to do with capturing Sam last September. Word is the B team beat the A team recently. Granted, Bernard Brogan was shooting for the Bs. Anyway Gilroy is unconcerned by the five or six regulars who have barely played in 2012.

“Even in the last six weeks Bernard has played a lot of games internally with us and it might take him a game or two to pick it up but it’s not something I would be overly concerned about.

“The flip side is they’ll be really fresh because they haven’t played much football. Take the likes of Alan and Bernard – they have had seven or eight years constantly on the go and maybe getting a break like that is a natural call from their bodies saying they need a break. Hopefully they’ll come back fresh from it.”

There has also been an influx of under-21 All-Ireland champions Emmett Ó Conghaile, Jack McCaffrey and Kevin O’Brien, with Ciarán Kilkenny to join them after the Leaving Certificate.

“There are a lot of guys who have pushed themselves into a position where we would be genuinely considering starting them and they mightn’t have started a game last year. So it’s going to be difficult to pick it but I would expect there to be a considerable number of new faces that didn’t feature last year.”