GAA: ALLIANZ FOOTBALL LEAGUE DIVISION ONE: Dublin 2-10 Down 0-13A LAST-KICK goal from Alan Brogan dug out a 2-10 to 0-13 win for Dublin over Down and bought Pat Gilroy's team a ticket to their first national final in a dozen years.
Not that you’d have guessed as much from the bearing of either side afterwards. “It’ll be nice to play in,” said Mossy Quinn, Dublin’s captain for the evening. “But it’s just another game.”
Summer is all.
Down led by a point here as the game ticked into stoppage time but even the concession of a careless 1-1 in a trice drew scarcely more than a sigh from James McCartan. You wouldn’t have said he was overly happy with it all but neither was he heartbroken.
McCartan left town intrigued, like a man who hadn’t quite been able to finish a particularly devilish Sudoku puzzle before his lunchbreak was up. “Never thought I’d come to Croke Park and find that Jedward would be the highlight of the evening,” he mused.
“We’ve no complaints about the defeat. You like coming to Croke Park and getting the experience and certainly Dublin asked a whole load of different questions today that other teams hadn’t asked of us throughout the league. I’m sure the football was very poor to watch because that’s the way it felt from where I was standing. The set-ups of both teams didn’t really lend themselves to good football.”
It should be said that conditions didn’t help a whole lot either. The rain that has swerved Dublin for most of the last month felt like it had checked its watch during the Dublin v Kilkenny hurling match earlier in the day and realised that it was April all of a sudden. The place got the full Old Testament treatment and margins for error were washed away. Even so, McCartan isn’t wrong. This was tough on the eyes at times.
You could understand why. The 3-9 that Dublin waved in over the course of 18 minutes against Mayo had to inform the way they approached their next outing.
“We had no choice,” said Gilroy. “With the way Down play, they’re moving men all over the place and coming at you and you have to go with them. You can’t give them overlaps. It’s a difficult style to play against. Our application in dealing with it was very encouraging.”
Dublin forwards funnelled back here to get hands, arms and shoulders in at every opportunity, as though Gilroy had made them write lines on a blackboard to that effect each day since the Mayo game. Down often found themselves having to kick raking passes across the pitch in search of a free man but to little avail.
You were left with a game of hard-earned scores and inside forwards trying to make silk purses out of sows’ ears. For that task Dublin had the Brogans on the pitch come the endgame. It turned out to be the difference.
The sides shared the first-half spoils, taking their tea level at 1-5 to 0-8. Dublin’s goal was nicely put together, a fit and spiky-looking Alan Brogan coming out and winning his own ball on the right touchline and spearing a high one in for the onrushing Paul Flynn to fist home on 11 minutes. They could have had a couple more but Denis Bastick lost his footing as he shot soon after and Flynn himself shook Brendan McVeigh’s right-hand post after some Down messing from a kick-out.
Down were enough lucky to survive but they rode that luck well, Danny Hughes, Kevin McKernan and Peter Fitzpatrick all kicking towering points from distance.
The nip and tuck continued in the second half, with Dublin inching a couple ahead with 15 to go through two Quinn points. Down scored the next three though – two Marty Clarke frees and a fine Conor Maginn effort that owed plenty to the buzzy industry of substitute Ronan Murtagh – to leave them a point up as time ran dead.
Enter the Brogans. There had been a minute’s silence before the game for their grandfather, Jim, a Mayoman who had moved to Dublin as a Garda in the 1950s and bequeathed a dynasty to Dublin football that endures still. Bernard, a second-half substitute here, lobbed over the equalising score and sent a kiss to the heavens. A minute later, Paul started the move on his own endline that led to Bernard crossing from the left and Alan pouncing on the ball spilled by Down midfielder Kalum King.
His goal sent the 35,264 crowd rocking and the two brothers in the forward line embraced, this time Alan kissing his fingers and pointing at the sky. A rare moment of sweetness to finish off an arm-wrestle of a match.
DUBLIN: S Cluxton; P McMahon, P Brogan, N Devereux; K Nolan, G Brennan, D Nelson; D Bastick, B Cahill (0-1); P Flynn (1-1), K McManamon, B Cullen (0-1); A Brogan (1-1), D Connolly (0-1), T Quinn (0-4, 0-3 frees). Subs: B Brogan (0-1) for McManamon (42 mins), MD McAuley for Bastick (43 mins), P Andrews for Cullen (58 mins), P Burke for Quinn (67 mins), D Kelly for Flynn (70 mins).
DOWN: B McVeigh; G McCartan, D Gordon, B McArdle; C Garvey, K McKernan (0-1), D Rooney; P Fitzpatrick (0-1), K King; D Hughes (0-2), M Poland (0-1), C Maginn (0-1); P McComiskey (0-2), B Coulter (0-2), M Clarke (0-3, all frees). Subs: D McCartan for McArdle (44 mins), D Alder for McVeigh (46 mins), J Colgan for Fitzpatrick (51 mins), R Murtagh for McComiskey (51 mins), E McCartan for Poland (58 mins), R Sexton for Coulter (temporary, 59-62 mins)
Referee: S Doyle (Kildare).
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