Sorry Jason, we just can't leave you alone

LOCKER ROOM:Mickey Whelan and Pat Gilroy's brand of football was always going to suit Jason Sherlock's genius, writes TOM HUMPHRIES

APOLOGIES IN advance to one of the principal subjects of this column. He’ll hate it. Detest it. Born into the greatest tempest of hype the GAA has ever seen surrounding one player, Jason Sherlock has become more and more Greta Garbo-like in the closing years of his epic career. He just likes to be left alone to enjoy his football. And the ever more infrequent references to the antic summer of 1995 are a mere irritant. A fly in the ointment of his focus.

Yet with due respect to the man’s privacy to it has to be said that he who would learn the art of forward play had best first devote an hour or two to watching Jason Sherlock at work. Jason stood still to shake hands with Emmet Bolton and never stopped moving for the next 50 minutes. He was on the field that long before coming down with a bout of cramp, an ailment of the elderly or the obsessively enthusiastic, two categories into which Sherlock fits.

Picked at left corner forward Sherlock tended to view the number on his back as merely a suggestion as to where he might begin the match. Poor Bolton took to facing away from the play and just facing Sherlock face-to-face in an effort to hold him. He might as well have been trying to catch a salmon with a knitting needle.

For Dublin’s first attack Sherlock faked the Kildare man out of his boots and gained four yards before coming back across the Kildare goal taking possession and popping a quick pass to Alan Brogan for a point.

Two minutes gone and Bolton was still facing the Hill trying to snare his man. Sherlock suddenly darted right pulling his marker with him. From behind Bolton there was the noise of steam train and Barry Cahill broke through on a diagonal run and popped the ball into the net. Next attack a quick change of pace and direction and Sherlock was in himself for a point. So it continued through the first half even as the hole which was Ger Brennan’s dismissal began to sink the ship. For a while Dublin reverted to type, thumping and thundering through the centre until the intelligence of Sherlock’s running reminded them of the beauty of angles and space.

Sherlock won a couple more frees and on 25 minutes he latched onto a high ball from Alan Brogan, the sort of punt that a small forward has no right to get. Swivel and pop. A huge goal for Dublin and a huge goal for Sherlock.

This could be Sherlock’s year to bookend with his stunning debut season. For so many seasons since then he has either been proving himself to new managements or operating within systems whose muscularity or directness didn’t quite suit him. This winter and spring he absented himself from the traditional slog and did his own work. It was a gamble that you wondered about but Mickey Whelan and Pat Gilroy’s brand of football was always going to suit his genius. Dublin’s quick passing style requires a brain capable of processing things quickly.

Sherlock just does not move into the positions himself, he directs those around him and offers some of the best and most imaginative passes in the game today.

Dublin have a long way to go but Sherlock’s six points from play against Westmeath and his scores and running yesterday might at last put him firmly in the frame for the All Star award he has always been denied.

It would be a fitting end. In a year when the Dublin management has made a policy decision to push the old stagers to the bench area from where thy might perform the duties of a fire brigade service, Sherlock has prospered to the point of being indispensable.

And if Jason does indeed move on he leaves the Dublin forward line in good shape. The emergence of his friend and clubmate Bernard Brogan as a shooter par excellence gives Dublin the sort of range which has been lacking for sometime.

The younger Brogan has long been a scoring sensation on the Dublin club scene and sometime soon will be instrumental in hauling Oliver Plunkett’s to a senior title, but his step up to the front rank of county marksmen (as GAA match programmes like to call fellas who can kick a ball over the bar) has been timely. For a while yesterday you worried if he would starve without the nourishment of Sherlock’s industrious intelligence around him. In the closing stages, though, he stood up and nailed down Dublin’s best performance in several years.

It was a showing which Dublin badly needed. You can suck the marrow from a 27-point win over Westmeath and still not gain much nourishment. Yesterday Dublin found out a little about themselves. There sideline stayed cool when Brennan committed his solecism. Dublin came to grips with the extra man by rotating forwards in and out and keeping Kieran McGeeney on the back foot.

There might be a little cause for alarm at the profile of some of the subs. At the end of the game old favourites Whelan, Ryan and Cullen were backboning the team once more.

Does that suggest Dublin haven’t grown without them or that Gilroy’s policy of broadening the panel has worked? Cullen, after his period in exile, produced his best performance in years and was in the frame for a man-of-the-match award. Ryan has attained his championship svelteness and the energy that goes with it. Whelan’s first act when he came on was to kick a point. If you have subs who will give you that it scarcely matters if they are old stagers or spotty young tyros.

For all the coltish excitement with which he cantered up and down the line in the last quarter Gilroy was cool and detached again within seconds of the final whistle blowing. A fifth Leinster final win on the trot for Dublin is but a means to an end.

The county needs to reach a September final before progress can be certified. It’s a journey of a thousand miles and Dublin have only taken a few steps so far this season. If they are to get a lease on September’s excitement they will need Sherlock and Bernard Brogan tormenting teams for the rest of the summer. Lots of other elements, too, but slowly and implacably they seem to be getting there.