Blue jigsaw puzzle finally fits into place

Pat Gilroy’s exceptional attention to detail and the work ethic he espoused, which eventually led to glory for Dublin, is clearly evident in these extracts from Malachy Clerkin’s new book

ONE KICK

WHEN IT’S your day of days, even the fixtures and fittings look like decorations. Diarmuid Connolly turned away from Aidan O’Mahony underneath the Cusack Stand, lost for an option beyond a meat-and-drink handpass inside to Kevin McManamon. His fisted pass looped a little in the air and actually overshot McManamon’s run ever so slightly.

As a result of it being a touch overhit, McManamon had to lurch to the left to grab the ball, which put his body in the perfect angle to pivot quickly to the right as he ran on to it. Had Connolly’s pass been flat and into McManamon’s chest, he would have run straight into Barry John Keane and either been done for charging or possibly gobbled up in the tackle. But his rapid left-right soft-shoe shuffle threw the young Kerry substitute.

No sooner had referee Joe McQuillan’s whistle sounded than Bernard Brogan had made up his mind what was going to happen next. Watch the replay again sometime and when the TV pictures show the second angle – from a camera in the Cusack Stand – you can see that McManamon has only just finished sprawling on the turf when Brogan waves his hand in the air to beckon Stephen Cluxton forward from the Canal End goal.

THE WILDERNESS YEARS

By the time Pat Gilroy took over at the fag end of 2008, there was a general acceptance that things had to change. On the pitch and off it as well. Dublin’s style of play meant they nearly always featured in the game of the summer, but it also meant they nearly always lost it too. The first thing Gilroy did on a training week in La Manga in January 2009 was show his new players a video of the Tyrone defeat the previous summer, pointing out all the space Tyrone’s midfield and half-forwards had to spray good ball into the inside forward line. That was going to become unacceptable under his regime.

There were new faces to come in, old faces to be let go. The sting was to be taken out of the annual hype machine that surrounded the Dublin football team, so corporate gigs for some of the better-known names were quietly but firmly frowned upon. Team-announcement press conferences took place first thing in the morning so Gilroy could get on with his day. The energy around the set-up was completely different from the beginning.

Not that it changed a whole lot in terms of results, at least initially. If anything, Dublin seemed to go backwards in Gilroy’s first year. Leinster was squirrelled away without a whole lot of drama but then Dublin were torn limb from limb by Kerry in the quarter-final. Colm Cooper scored a goal after 32 seconds and Kerry won by 1–24 to 1–7 in the end. With the quote of the year, Gilroy said his men looked ‘like startled earwigs’ in the face of the onslaught.

Gilroy’s Dublin looked different from what had gone before, they sounded different and they acted different. But nobody was overly convinced yet that they actually were any different. When 2010 saw them kicked unceremoniously out of Leinster by a rampant Meath side who plundered five goals, it was hard to escape the feeling that pitchforks and torches might not be far behind.

They inched their way through the qualifiers, but that was what was expected of them. It seemed like years since they’d caused a shock of their own. But then came Tyrone in the quarter-final. Mickey Harte’s team might not have been the all-consuming fire of the previous years but that didn’t mean dousing them felt any less meaningful for Dublin. Eoghan O’Gara’s goal five minutes from the end put them into the semi-final against Cork, but it did far more than that.

O’Gara’s goal was the moment when everything changed. Just like that, the energy around Dublin football was turned on its head. This was a triumph that hadn’t come easily and hadn’t been expected, and thus it somehow felt more real. Over the course of a decade and a half, overbearing triumphalism had given way to weary fatalism. Neither emotion was healthy.

Even though Cork pipped them in the semi-final, the bad old days seemed to be over. There had been false dawns before, of course, but none built on foundations as solid as these. Now they had a team that had made its way in the world on the back of hard work and hammer blows.

Nobody fretted too much over losing to Cork, for the simple reason that few people believed the Dubs were ready to win an All Ireland in 2010. Cork were. But 2011? Well, that was a different story. If Dublin weren’t going to be ready then, they might never be.

SPRINGTIME

For much of the league final, it looked as though Dublin would barely notice the absences of Alan Brogan and Eoghan O’Gara. Bernard Brogan was having one of those just-give-me-the-ball days where every touch he had seemed to draw a gasp. He put Mossy Quinn in for an early goal, and although Cork reeled Dublin in by the 20th minute, Brogan immediately put them ahead again.

Three minutes into the second half, he had a goal of his own to show for the torrid day he’d been giving Michael Shields, the All Star full back in each of the last two years. And when Connolly lobbed over a point soon after, it put Dublin 2-12 to 0-10 ahead. A first league title in 18 years was half an hour away – they had the game in the bag, they only had to tie the knot in it.

But it wasn’t to be. Inch by inch and point by point, Cork tapped them on the shoulder and reminded them there was a game still to be played. Bryan Cullen went off injured on 47 minutes, Bernard Brogan and Connolly soon after.

It meant that when Cork scored four points in as many minutes to wipe out their lead eight minutes from time, Dublin had nobody to turn to who could grab the lead back. Dean Kelly blazed wide when straight through on goal, Quinn missed a handy free. F our minutes later, Cork forward Ciarán Sheehan cut in from the right and popped the winning score. Dublin ended the game with two points in the closing 30 minutes.

The charitable view was that this wasn’t a disgrace. Cork were reigning All-Ireland and league champions. They had been around the block and had fallen on their faces just as many times as Dublin had. The difference was they knew what it was like to win, they knew the value of patience.

The less charitable view was that this was nothing new for Dublin. This was Mayo, Kildare, Tyrone, Cork – all those days rolled into one and presented as evidence of who they were. Gilroy addressed the question at length in the press conference afterwards. “If I really believe that (the team is mentally weak) then I should walk out the door here and never be in front of this team,” he said. “They will get stick for this. It was an eight-point lead and they lost. People will say what you’ve just said and we’ll deal with that and we have to deal with it because that’s our job.

“We are the Dublin team and we have to listen to that. And when we have the All-Ireland, some day, that’s when we’ll stop hearing that. That’s the challenge. Because that’s what everyone is going to think but I know what’s in that dressingroom. They have serious character and anyone who questions it, well, they might get a surprise. Some day.”

ALL CHANGED, CHANGED UTTERLY

Eight teams left. Kerry v Limerick, Mayo v Cork, Donegal v Kildare, Dublin v Tyrone. Nobody doubted which was the tie of the round, but look for anyone to call it and you’d be looking a long time. Dublin or Tyrone? New breed or old broom?

Dublin had a whole month to stew in the juices of their Leinster final display. If it was an article of faith that they wouldn’t be as bad again, it was nonetheless a worrying time of the year to be on the parabola’s downswing rather than the ascent.

That’s the trouble with having a month between the Leinster final and the All-Ireland quarter-final. While Dublin twiddled thumbs, Tyrone were able to rebuild their team and their confidence. They put Armagh to the sword in Omagh, then they sent Roscommon home from Croke Park, overcoming a shaky first half to run out 3–19 to 1–14 winners in the end. Two games away from another final, their tails were wagging.

All Dublin could do was keep on keeping on and remind themselves that regardless of what had happened in the Leinster final, they were still on course. Indeed, it suited Pat Gilroy to be coming into the All-Ireland series with people seeing his side as an afterthought. Right from the beginning of his tenure, one thing he’d tried to do was rid the Dublin football team of hype. Too often down the years he’d seen Dublin teams get over-played and over-promoted. He’d seen players who just weren’t as good as they thought they were find their actual level at the worst possible moment – on big days in front of huge crowds. It was never pretty, and he figured if he was able to lower the expectation levels and take the air out of the occasional bouts of drama that surrounded the team, he might be on to something.

So over his three years in charge, he’d done what he could to calm everything down. To deal with the media, he organised weekly 8am press conferences where he announced his team for the weekend and offered up a player for interviews. It meant that neither he nor his players were being plagued for interviews the week of games, that they didn’t have to waste energy avoiding numbers they didn’t recognise flashing on their phones.

With his squad, he made it clear that the flashy, bombastic days of old were gone. The days of marching en masse down to Hill 16 before games were over, as were the days of gloating at opponents after big scores had gone in. If you scored a goal, your job was to cover your man to stop a quick kick-out. It wasn’t to get in the face of the corner back. There was no need for swagger. Just work, that’s all. Just work.

It extended to all aspects of their existence as Dublin footballers. Those 6.30am training sessions in January weren’t just a way to get the players out of bed and teach them the worth of suffering. They were also a way of getting two training sessions a day into them, one in the morning and one in the evening. Come summer, Dublin wouldn’t want for fitness and they wouldn’t want for work ethic either. And in the end, work ethic and fitness and the absence of hype all fed into what they did on the pitch.

Gilroy’s style of play demanded all of this and more. You had to work till you wept, you had to track back as far as was necessary no matter what number was on your shirt. It was hard to crank up a hype machine around a team of diligent worker bees.

But first they had to deal with Tyrone. And boy, did they deal with them. Dublin 0-22 Tyrone 0-15 – and Tyrone were flattered by the margin. Dublin ate them whole and without salt. They kicked 11 points in each half, 19 of them from play in a performance that was first and foremost about Dublin’s utter dominance around the middle.

With 20 minutes to go, both of Tyrone’s starting midfielders and their whole half-forward line had been replaced. Manager Mickey Harte ruefully admitted afterwards that if he’d been allowed to make 10 substitutions he would have.

The result was huge, the performance a warning shot to the championship. Whatever way you spun it, Dublin were now legitimate. They’d sent Tyrone packing for a second year in a row, burnt them at the stake and never looked back. Whatever happened from now on, they would be viewed differently. All of a sudden, they were two wins away from Valhalla.

EVERYBODY WORKS, EVERYBODY FIGHTS

Anyone who had watched Donegal play during the summer knew that this was just about the best possible team to burst the Dublin balloon. McGuinness had put together the most cussed and awkward side the championship had seen for years. No, they hadn’t been running up big scores but they’d still won every game in Ulster by at least three points.

The key to Donegal was their defence. Or, more to the point, their defensive system. Every team these days got men back, but nobody got as many back as Donegal. They flooded their defence with at least eight bodies at all times, regularly having up to 11 or 12 behind their own 45-metre line. They marked space instead of marking men. The most any team had scored against them over 70 minutes was Cavan’s 1–8.

On top of getting back and crowding out space, Donegal were unbelievably disciplined. They hit hard without giving away scoreable frees – in the five games they’d played before the semi-final (plus the extra-time) they’d conceded only 17 points to free kicks. Long story short: if you were going to score a point against Donegal, you were going to earn it.

The game was putrid stuff, hard work to watch, never mind play. The Dublin crowd booed Donegal every time they flicked off another handpass – but in truth, there was the pair of them in it. Darragh Ó Sé would say in his Irish Times column the following week that “Colm McFadden must have been thinking he was the best footballer in the country because there were times that Dublin had three players marking him”.

Donegal went into half-time 0-4 to 0-2 ahead. All in all, Dublin had spent a sum total of 14 minutes chasing a lead all summer. Now they would have to chase one against the toughest defence in the country.

Not that Gilroy saw any need for alarm at half-time. “That was one of the easiest team talks I’ve ever had to give because we were exactly where we thought we would be,” he said afterwards. “We expected that game. The hard team talks are when you’re dealing with something that you don’t expect.”

Dublin set about clawing them back. Stephen Cluxton kicked a free and a 45 that were pure oxygen as the Dubs struggled for breath. McManamon had come on at half-time and was running at defenders. Bernard Brogan kicked a free of his own before a flicking a gorgeous through ball for McManamon to run on to, and the substitute knocked over Dublin’s first point from play, a full hour into the game.

They were helped by the fact that Donegal didn’t have a second card to play. Once Dublin drew level, McGuinness’s players got panicky and suddenly looked exhausted. Their system had been set up to eke out a lead and to protect it. When the squeeze came on from Dublin and Bryan Cullen put them ahead with eight minutes to go, Donegal were powerless to react. In the end, Dublin crawled through by 0-8 to 0-6.

JUDGEMENT DAY

Gilroy had his plan for the three weeks worked out and ready to go. The day after the semi-final, each player was given an itinerary of what the three weeks would hold for them. They were told who would be going to the press day the following Friday, where and when each training session would be, everything.

The days of the 6.30am training sessions were long gone. The last thing Gilroy wanted was a repeat of 1995, when hordes had descended on Dublin’s training sessions.

They held training sessions at 3.30 in the afternoon. Invariably, that meant they held them without an audience.

Gilroy got in contact with former panel member Conal Keaney, who was the sales manager at the Avon Rí resort in Blessington, Co Wicklow, to see if he could organise accommodation for the squad at short notice. He could, and the whole panel decamped there for the weekend of the All-Ireland hurling final. There was a pitch for them to train on and meeting rooms for them to hatch plans in. It got them out of the city and into the groove.

The day before the final, they were put through one final training session. The warm-up on All-Ireland final day was to be shorter than usual because of pre-match formalities, so they replicated the shorter warm-up in the final training session. They even had a mock red-carpet drill. You fill time as best you can in the lead-up to an All Ireland, and standing players in a line to meet a fake president killed 10 minutes and got them laughing.

THE PROMISED LAND

The pass inside. The reach from McManamon. The jink from left to right that threw Barry John Keane. McManamon hitting the turf. Joe McQuillan calling a foul.

Time stood still. Bernard Brogan took the ball from McManamon and patted him on the back, then turned to the Canal End again to wave Cluxton forward. The walk-up took a whole minute. Coolest man in the place. Five steps back. Two to the left. Ten seconds remaining on the clock. A rub of the gloves on the front of his shirt. A punch of left glove into the right. A run-up. A plant of the right foot. A swing of the left. Straight between the posts.

Book The Dubs – The Road to Sam Maguire