Boys are back in town but all is changed

Sideline Cut: These are confusing times for dear old Dublin town. Already, I am pining for the Dubs. Half the fun in the All-Ireland championship is waiting for a crowd of heathens to come up to the city and take a pinprick to the great sky-blue balloon. Westmeath didn't even have the decency to wait until it was inflated. As the Dubs fled from the stage in Croke Park and Tom Lyons entered the Hamlet phase of his managerial life, general disorder broke out around the city.

How bewildering playing for Dublin must be. Two summers ago, they were drawing the biggest sporting crowd on this planet and today they host London in the winter shell of Parnell Park. There will not be a more discrepant pairing all summer than the glamour boys from the city and their lowly expatriate contemporaries from the Irish quarters of London. They might trade A-Z guides as well as handshakes at the toss of the coin.

But if Dublin supporters are all they are cracked up to be they will turn up in force in Donnycarney today. It is one thing singing Molly Malone in Croke Park with 70,000 others when it is sunny and Armagh are in town. It is another showing up for a rudimentary qualifying game when the television cameras are elsewhere, when confidence is low and when former heroes of the Hill are scornful of the current team.

The calling for the resignation of Tommy Lyons at this stage of the season was as daft as it was interesting. His departure would have served only to deepen the crisis of psyche and identity that has afflicted this Dublin team.

In a sense, Lyons's current predicament mirrors the last days of the Gerard Houllier era at Anfield. Because the early promise has proved a chimera, he is virtually being stalked by the gods of yesteryear who are only too happy to remind everyone of how it was in their day. Going ballistic about the absence of a free-taker after the event is all very well but none of the critics have actually pinpointed whom they wish to take the frees. Had Jason Sherlock - who could yet have a big say in this year's championship - nailed that goal, then the criticism would have been muted.

This is not about apologising for Tom Lyons, but he did make a valid point this week when he finally quit his Garbo-like silence. Dublin - at least this present team - have no divine right to win at Croke Park.

Dublin lost because they are a middling team and Westmeath are a middling team. Dublin have more flair but also they have a fatal tendency, symbolised by Ciarán Whelan, to disappear for large periods of games. That was most glaringly apparent in the league down in Castlebar when they managed all of three points against a young Mayo team. It seemed to me that was the afternoon Tom Lyons lost his verve: that the energy the Dublin job requires just finally sapped him. Three points just should not happen to a serious team, regardless of where, when, who or why. And Tomás Quinn was kicking frees that day.

The impression this current crop of Dublin players give is of a thoroughly decent bunch of young men, which may be part of the problem. Wasn't it true that Dublin circa 1990-1995 had among their number a healthy sprinkling of - not to be too delicate about it - bollockses? Loud, funny, unshakeable and hardy types, loath to dwell on anything too much. For let's face it, if that bunch had been given to introspection, instead of winning the All-Ireland in 1995, they would have been seeking therapy for a collective nervous breakdown. But win it they did: they assumed a place in the pantheon with the fabled brigade from the 1970s, they paraded old Sam around the city pubs and told a yarn better than oul Captain Boyle.

Yet deep down that group must wrestle with the dark knowledge that the first half of the 1990s represents an era of failed opportunity for Dublin football. What could conceivably have been a three-in-a-row golden age concluded in a kind of spluttering All-Ireland that left the sensation that Dublin were the last ones sitting at the banquet table simply because everyone else had eaten their fill and gone away. It was the loneliest All-Ireland victory of the modern age.

And the shadow of Kevin Heffernan still permeates every GAA house of the city - not through any fault of the man himself. It is fun listening to Dub friends, suave bastards all, getting dreamy and lachrymose about their sweetheart days when Heffo was king and Phil Lynott was young.

I have to admit to a certain curiosity when the famous 1976 victory featured on the nostalgia show Reeling in the Years this week. I pressed my face close to the screen in the hope of catching a glimpse of anyone familiar running across the field, flared of denim and foolish of hair and perhaps wearing a shirt still on the scene today. But no. All I got was dangerously close to the flying locks of Brian Mullins.

It is easy to see why the Dubs of a certain age are filled with a longing of Housman-type sentiment: the happy highways where I went and cannot come again. Because the feeling the Heffernan years invoked - that tremulous awakening - cannot be revisited. And perhaps part of the problem for Dublin football is that its players feel in a vague way obliged to evoke that era again.

Instead, they just borrow its brightest tools. Dublin have problems. The argument about Dublin having a million people to choose from is fine but any manager can select only 15.

Maybe the problem with the present bunch is that they are too similar: too earnestly athletic and open in their intentions. Selecting from players of true-blue origin, lads whose grandfathers supped Arthur's with Big Jim Larkin, is a noble policy but it is also limiting. Fermanagh exile Rory Gallagher, for instance, is the precise type of player sorely missing from the Dublin team the last day: unhurried, natural on the ball, accurate with either foot and with a proven temperament as a free-taker.

And didn't Dublin always have at least one chubby, Mars-bar-munching genius à la Jimmy Keaveney or Joe McNally? Maybe the future of Dublin football is to be discovered outside Mario's takeaway some Friday night. Also, maybe Ciarán Whelan would be better off liberated from the grind of midfield to fill the void at centre-half forward. And the sooner Ian Robertson gets a run, the better. And Tom Lyons needs to get lippy and bold again. He needs to say he'd love a crack at Man U - and mean it.

It may be too late now to make a difference: Lyons will become the latest Dublin manager to bow to the mysteries of the job unless this do-or-die situation inspires his team to go on the rampage until next September. Only weeks ago, many people were listing Dublin among their All-Ireland contenders. That looks a remote shot now but there is no shame in losing to Westmeath and in many ways, the pressure is off. Sport is funny. I know if I were a big-name manager, I would just as soon avoid Dublin for the time being.

This is a critical time for Dublin football and today is a grim and humbling reality check, not only for the players and Tom Lyons but also for the masses who proclaim their love from the Hill and most especially for the former-heroes-turned-cat-callers.

The time for self-deception is over. If those who claim to care about Dublin football are worth their salt, they will turn out in numbers in Parnell Park and give their team a chance. It's summer and the boys are back in town. But it's a changed town.