ALLIANZ NHL DIVISION ONE: TOM HUMPHRIESanalyses the current state of Dublin hurling as Anthony Daly's team prepare for tomorrow's must-win league encounter against struggling Limerick

KNOCKING ON heaven’s door? You dress properly and you bring a good wine but that doesn’t mean you are getting in. You shave and you polish your shoes and iron a crease into your trousers. Means nothing. Admission is at the whims of the gods.

Dublin began this decade wondering if their revolution was at the tipping point, hoping that the momentum which had been gathered in a decade’s hard work in the fields would give the senior side enough momentum to go storming heaven.

In January there was giddy talk of reaching the National League final. Tomorrow, though, Dublin play Limerick for the right to stay in Division One for another year. Less knocking on heaven’s door. More school of hard knocks.

You know the story. It’s inches. The smallest things. The difference between success and struggle is everywhere. Anthony Daly has a belief, for instance, in tending to the minute details, a compulsion which belies the near volcanic passion he brings to the sideline.

When Dublin play away games he drives to Dublin and then travels on the team bus while one of the backroom team drives ahead in Daly’s car. Daly just feels the need to be on the bus, to be the thermometer which takes the temperature of the team.

Dublin beat Tipperary by nine points in Parnell Park in February and, thinking that a corner had been turned, Daly decided to loosen the reins the next day out for the trip to play Offaly at Tullamore. He said goodbye at training. He’d see them in the dressingroom on Sunday.

Mistake!

“Jesus when I saw their pusses coming through the bit of an old gate to the dressingrooms down there. In fairness, the boys Richie (Stakelum) and Vinnie (Teehan) and Hedgo (Ciarán Hetherton) had a chat with them in Dublin before they left, but it was Mother’s Day and it was like they were down for their Mother’s day spin.

“Like collecting the mother out of the nursing home and bringing her down the country for an oul jaunt. Gentle jesus! We tried to rescue it a bit in the dressingroom but in their heads they were after beating Tipp by nine points and now they were thinking, ‘surely we’ll beat Offaly’. It’s youth and immaturity. You can’t guard for that. Just live through it and learn every day from it.”

So, the learning comes dripping slow. On the first day of the league they had gone to Waterford. A Waterford team playing at half strength. Davy Fitz apparently cowering pre-emptively against the terrible blows Dublin were about to deliver.

“Against Waterford there was a good mood,” says Stephen Hiney,

“maybe a bit too relaxed. We went down the night before the game and I don’t know if that works too well for us. We were well-prepared we thought, and we went out and they just blew us apart. They were up for it. They left us dead on our feet. It wasn’t their full squad and I’m not sure we were expecting it. They hockeyed us.”

“We went down,” adds Daly “and had an old meeting in the hotel and told ourselves everything was right, but it wasn’t. Waterford were waiting and they gave us a good old kick in the arse.”

So that was three games gone and a bubble burst. Two major disasters sandwiching a remarkable win over Tipp. What’s a boss to do? This week, Daly’s phone has been red-hot.

Everybody wants to ask the same question. Is the flame of revolution on the brink of being extinguished?

“Our lads believed a lot of hype from last year,” says Daly. “We played Waterford just before the championship last year down in Thurles on a lovely night and they were at full strength and so were we and we had a right match and we lost by two points. It was a right game though. Séamus Roche in reffing it. The real thing.

“Our fellas then going out in February being told they were playing a second-string Waterford. I understood that to an extent. Driving home from Tullamore though I was genuinely disappointed.”

Win or lose tomorrow they will look back wistfully at this Division One campaign.

Regrets? They have a few.

“Definitely the Waterford game was a disaster,” says Liam Rushe in his sophomore year now as a prodigy and meeting tougher challenges every time he goes out. “Really we never got into it at all and we went down with such expectations. And Offaly, we never started. Never came off the blocks. We couldn’t get going at all. I don’t know if it was the favourites thing. We wondered that ourselves.

“We spoke about it. That’s what we have been working on. Not going in with any expectations. Just working on performances. Getting the scores. Keeping their score down.”

After Offaly they lost the next three games as well. Kilkenny. Cork. Galway. Null points. Perversely, they got more of what they wanted out of that series of duck-eggs than they had from the first half of the campaign. Performance.

Consistency.

Because of the obvious similarities in their station, Daly tends to talk occasionally about Clare pre-1995. He remembers the services of Liam Moggan being called for. Moggan is one of those useful shadows whom elite teams deploy but for whom it is impossible to place a label.

“People think these fellas are head gurus,” says Daly with amusement. “They aren’t. What Liam offers is somebody to talk with, in that way his presence is another tool that is there. Lads are comfortable with Liam if they want to talk to him.

“There is no hypnosis that will put you to sleep for 10 minutes and wake you up ready to win the Leinster championship. Liam is part of the team effort. Everybody working together.”

Anyway that’s Liam Moggan. What is needed of him?

Well Daly remembers one day talking with Moggan who provides a similar service for Ken Doherty. Out of interest, Daly asked Moggan how good he was at snooker. To his surprise, Moggan replied that he had never held a cue in his life and didn’t intend to. “So,” said Daly, “what do you do for Doherty”. “I take him to The Crucible twice a week,” said Moggan.

And that has been Dublin’s lesson from this league. Get to the crucible twice a week. Learn how to deliver under pressure.

“The way it is,” says Stephen Hiney, “management goes off the form we bring into training matches. If you perform in training you get in the team. There is a lot of emphasis on the matches in training, on the performances, recreating that pressure in training.

“That is something that has been brought in with this management. They have said ‘listen lads we aren’t on the pitch playing. It is up to you boys.’ It is being developed at the moment.

“A few years ago there would have been very few who would step up when the chips are down. This year a lot of the lads have stepped up. Johnny McCaffrey was taken off in the last game of the championship last year. This year he has been amazing. Peter Kelly has developed a huge amount. It is lads driving other lads. No better motivation. Better coming from a player than management.”

Dublin’s training games are ferocious affairs and Daly is satisfied that, though naivete still streaks some of their performances, they are coming to grips with the complicated business of knowing how to summon the best of themselves.

“It is a hard road. I know it from Clare. To get to the right state, the old synergy where the mind and body are doing things together. Some days the mind is too wired. Some days the body won’t go along. For the Cork game, the mind was really willing but we were making stupid mistakes out of over-anxiousness.”

“It is somewhere in that zone you have to get to. Urgent but not panicking. Ready to perform. Ready to fight the fight. Yet relaxed enough to pull off the basic skills and the difficult skills too, at top pace. What we are about is trying to get to that. That is why it is so important to stay in Division One.”

Against Cork, they sensed the game was there for the taking but they couldn’t find the momentum within themselves to haul the opposition down. Against Kilkenny they matched the Cats, 23 scores apiece. Two of Kilkenny’s scores were goals however and none of Dublin’s were. And then against Galway, Shane Durkin drove a huge attempt wide in the last minute when a draw was on the cards. Then Galway swept down and tagged on another point.

The draw evaporated and became a two-point loss.

Still.

“Getting that performance in Galway was as good as the draw,” says Daly. “The gun was to our head in Galway at half-time. We didn’t close the deal but the perseverance is the thing. Push on. Learn every day from it. Look at what we did wrong every day. Look at what we did right. Push on.”

The last three outings were tough but they did more right than they did wrong. Kilkenny. Cork. Galway. The games you want. They steadied the ship.

Same old business though. Damn inches. If the league campaign hadn’t turned into a relegation struggle so early, Daly had planned to experiment with his panel. He hasn’t had the chance to tinker much but even so he sees some serious positives in terms of the depth of his squad.

“Paul Ryan has put himself in position. We played Ballyhale a couple of months ago and he was atrocious, he had been sick during that week. Looking at him back then I would have said he wouldn’t be in the 24. Paul, in his attitude and pushing on has forced his case though.

“Peter Kelly too. I had a one-to-one chat with him. Told him, ‘you have to work harder, you have to become a bit of a Dirk Kuyt’. He has skill and awareness. Just more work needed. He is responding.

“Mossie O’Brien came in with a belly on him last February 12 months. Now look at him. He was a bit-player last year but he has performed great in the league.

“There is a message there for everyone. I made the point when I came first. I’m not interested in forming relationships with lads. I won’t be picking fellas on their faces or their friendship. You can’t be everybody’s friend at county level. If I see you at training with the wrong body language and the wrong attitude, you’ve a long way to go to get picked.”

And so tomorrow they have their showdown with Limerick, Justin McCarthy’s besieged legion. Limerick. Surely there is nothing to fear?

Yet in Daly’s reign it is Limerick who have sucker-punched Dublin more often and more painfully than anybody. Last year’s league defeat hurt badly coming, as it did, on the back of a fine run.

Then last summer Dublin went to Thurles with an All-Ireland semi-final spot on offer. They outhurled Limerick for long stretches. Yet in the clutch Limerick exposed an appalling greenness to Dublin’s play. In the last 10 minutes, Dublin made a series of schoolboy howlers. Limerick rode on.

Are Dublin still green? Still vulnerable in games they should win? Still error-prone in the heat? They need to know before summer.

“I hope not,” says Rushe.

“I would say we are better than we were at this stage last year. We have improved. We are as competitive. We had a few unfortunate results this year whereas last year we were a little bit fortunate. We caught Galway and Waterford and Cork were on strike. It’s about performance.”

“I’d like to say yeah, absolutely we are past that,” says Hiney.

“And I think we are but it hasn’t been an easy process. We are still making a few naive mistakes. We can’t say we are a young team anymore. There are a lot of young players but they have a good deal of experience. A lot of the innocence is gone.

“The league didn’t go to plan I suppose but we are happy with some performances, unhappy with others. It comes down to a massive game this weekend. We can answer better after that.”

And Daly, he who has made this journey before, yomping through years of failure to a better time in a promised land?

“It comes down to the heat of the battle,” he says. “In Clare, in terms of intensity, it took a hard core in the group to come together and realise that the days were moving on and we wouldn’t have this chance again.

“The time comes where you have to seize the day. That hasn’t come yet for the boys but I think it is getting nearer.”

Slowly. Slowly. Slowly.

Tomorrow a performance will be enough to exorcise a few ghosts.