City braces itself for more Dublin fireworks

LOCKER ROOM:Dublin management must create an environment where players are on the edge and consistently looking to play to their limits, writes Tom Humphries

SO, NEXT weekend, the cycle begins again for Dublin’s footballers. Croke Park. Tyrone. Fireworks. Pat Gilroy’s inauguration could scarcely be more conspicuous but that’s the territory.

One wonders what it must feel like to be Jason Sherlock and to sit there listening to the vows and promises of the fifth management set-up he has played under since winning an All-Ireland medal in his first year as a county senior. Does he look at the moving lips of the management and thing yadda yadda yadda? Or does he glance around at the players around him and back at the manager and say to himself, “boy you’ve got a lot to learn about what’s sitting on these benches!”

The Sunday papers were brimming with Dubs stuff yesterday and, as the week goes on, so the hoopla will intensify until the city is a bright shining ball of hype. There are those here in the capital who feel this is a bad thing and that Dublin footballers should be granted a cloak of invisibility until such time as they reach an All-Ireland final again.

Life doesn’t work that way, however, and the recent work trip to Spain will have taught the incoming administration that hard truth in one easy lesson. A few years ago when Jack O’Connor took his first Kerry team away for some sun and surf and sweat a young prodigy called Dan Doona got his jaw busted in the course of some disagreement and had to be flown home. There were some rumours floated in the Kerry media as to the reason for Doona’s early return, but it was literally years before the broken jaw story was confirmed.

From La Manga, by contrast, one Diarmuid Connolly took an early flight home. Certainly he returned with a tailwind of managerial disapproval behind him but not as an outcast or a pariah. He bumped into a journalist at Dublin airport and by the next day, news of

his return/dismissal was all over the place. So it goes in the city.

Ditto Gilroy’s appointment. One area where there is no recession is in the market for Dublin opinion mongers who will opine publicly that the appointment of Pat Gilroy and Mickey Whelan has “St Vincent’s fingerprints all over it”.

They got another run out in the Sunday’s yesterday.

I wasn’t at the Grand Lodge meeting in St Vincents when it was decided that Pat Gilroy should be elevated to the seat of Worshipful Master and even if I had been there I would be proscribed from divulging the details.

Broadly speaking, however, I understand that after the usual allegorical rituals and handshakes had been performed, it was agreed by all brothers on the square to petition He who is known to us as The Great Architect of The Universe (and to others as Kevin Heffernan) to formerly exalt Giller and to bodily lift him, if necessary, into his new and anointed station in life. At that point, as lodge ritual demands, everyone hopped on their right leg in an anti-clockwise direction, each mason with his left hand held behind his head. The chant began low and guttural at first – ah, I’ve said too much already. Sorry.

(As an Entered Apprentice in the St Vincent’s lodge I am only too happy to discount and refute another hilarious version of the Gilroy appointment story wherein a “three-man” committee (lol) was asked by the county board to choose a Dublin manager and duly reached an impasse in their deliberations. They sat pondering aloud as to what they might do. One member asked who might have been the brightest of the bunch on the last panel of Dubs to have won an senior All-Ireland back in 1995. It was decided that Pat Gilroy was that man. Immediately it was suggested by a member of the committee – somebody called Kevin Heffernan who is NOT in fact Pat Gilroy’s godfather – that Pat was unlikely to have the time and inclination to do the job.

According to this version of events Pat was subsequently sounded out and surprised everyone by saying he would be willing to serve. The committee not having a large clamour of outstanding candidates to deal with then decided they liked the feel of the appointment (as did just about anyone who has met Pat Gilroy and watched him operate) and proceeded with it. Gas isn’t it? Mickey Whelan was added later on to the ticket by Pat Gilroy himself who being smarter than the average bear realised that Mickey’s training techniques and tactical nous would be invaluable. Enough. The whole thing is too fantastically far fetched to be given credence.

Anyway it is too much to ask that next Saturday Dublin will come out onto Croke Park toting a new vision of how football should be played and proceed to demolish Tyrone, thus sending Mickey Harte from the cathedral scratching his head and proclaiming that he has seen the future, as Pat Gilroy walks home on the surface of the canal.

What will be interesting, though, will be the complexion of the team which is picked and the extent to which it includes those players who are deemed within football circles in the city to be living in that luxury compound known as the comfort zone. In Dublin, residence within the comfort zone confers you with an automatic place on the team, considerable celebrity and probably a sponsored car plus ease of access to Copper Face Jacks. Having won anything of significance is not a criteria for entry to the zone.

The first job of the new Dublin management will not be to live up to the flashbulb hype of next weekend but to create an environment where Dublin players are on the edge and consistently looking to play to their limits on the field AND in training.

Having decided who needs discomfiting the management must then find credible candidates to fill the newly-vacated jerseys. In Dublin this is harder to do than it should be. I have a theory that when mentors form underage teams they tend to stick those players they consider to be the fastest and the best into the half-back line, midfield and the half-forward line. Couple of big and slow ones at full back and full forward and hide the rest out in the corners. When it comes to sending players to development squads the result is a surfeit of wing-back/wing-forward types, lots of indulgently soloing midfielders and practically nothing in the specialist positions across the full-back and full-forward line.

Dublin’s pre-Christmas tournament using regional teams was a rational response to the deficiencies of the normal trial system and the quality of the people whom the one Dublin management team drew on board to manage the regional operations spoke well of a quiet intelligence at the centre of things. There were a few big names on the club circuit in the city who didn’t make the plane for La Manga but those watching closely on the second day of proceedings noted that specific markers were put on specific players to ask the sort of questions that the Dublin management wanted answered. The answers came in. End of.

The big dance with Tyrone isn’t likely to end happily and even if it does they will give out no cup at the end of it. For Dublin it is a chance to further accustom their players and their management to the business of playing in front of a full house.

The real work will be done looking for a natural full back and full forward, a couple of corner backs who aren’t rethreads from the wing-back bucket and maybe just one corner forward who can get six balls a game and pop four of them over the bar?

And it will be done in the months ahead deprogramming Dublin from one style and one mindset and persuading the players that a swifter, lighter, more confident approach to the game might be the way forward.

Next weekend brings a welcome, lights, cameras, action start to the GAA year. It should be fun and it should be interesting. In the end, though, it will be as meaningless as any of the other league games being played.

That it will attract as much coverage as all those games put together is the first lesson that the Dublin management will absorb and opt to live with.

That’s the territory. Lead on without paranoia in your heart!