Dublin's hunger can tilt the balance

GAELIC GAMES:SOMETIMES THE prelude can be as important as the big event. After an entertaining Allianz National Football League, two of the prime contenders for the summer's All-Ireland football championship meet in Croke Park.

Cork have played throughout the spring with the self-containment that comes with winning an All-Ireland championship, seemingly making it to this stage without really thinking too much about it.

Dublin’s approach has been more methodical and obvious, starting with those dawn training sessions in deep mid-winter and defined by several scintillating performances under lights, including those against both Kerry and Cork.

Also, they have discovered how to score goals for fun; if they can maintain this good habit until next autumn, few teams will stop them.

There is no question that this match is more important to Dublin. They are playing against the reigning league and All-Ireland champions and the team who eclipsed them at the very death of last year’s gripping All-Ireland semi-final, the match in which Pat Gilroy’s men made the mistake of looking down from the tightrope at precisely the wrong time.

That match was the crucial day in the making of this Cork team. Instead of leaving Croke Park with the psychological blow of losing yet another semi-final – and this time to a young and irresistible force – they were able to summon the hurt of previous years and use it to get them across the line.

In the All-Ireland final against Down, they became gargantuan before our eyes.

They shook off all those doubts and went from being the team who should be dominating to the team that was.

And so even though they are the same team that Dublin met last August in the championship, they now possess the most invaluable asset in football: the knowledge that they can win it all.

And it is that knowledge that Dublin need to find. This is as good a match as any to help that process along.

It is all very well to treat this final as a bonus match but, as their league encounters against Kerry and Cork demonstrated, these matches can combust into struggles that belie the protagonists’ feeling about the league.

Whatever use winning a league title will be to Dublin this summer, finishing with a defeat is something that Pat Gilroy’s young team could do without.

It is a shame for neutrals as well as Dublin fans that Alan Brogan is unavailable for this match. Of all the players to benefit from the attention that his younger brother Bernard commands from opposition defences, none have made hay quite like Alan.

His role within Dublin’s high -octane forward unit has changed and he has the freedom and the vision to pick and choose his moment, exploiting the gaps in opposing defences and drifting into unmarked territory.

His reading of the game is crucial to the Dublin attack and, for all of Diarmuid Connolly’s mercurial talents and the accuracy of Tomás Quinn, the Dublin attack will be workaholic but limited without the senior Brogan.

Although denied the talents of Aidan Walsh, Paul Kerrigan, Eoin Cadogan, the recuperating Graham Canty and Colm O’Neill, Cork manger Conor Counihan has named a formidable side.

Walsh’s unavailability reunites Alan O’Connor with his old partner Nicholas Murphy; the pair have physique and experience over the Dublin duo but not the same pace or around-the-field energy.

Coping with Cork’s attack can be both physically and mentally sapping; they wear teams down. No team is better at busting holes in opposition defences, with devastating ball-carriers like Pearse O’Neill or John Miskella driving deep and then turning to recycle passes for marksmen like Daniel Goulding or Paddy Kelly or Donnacha O’Connor to have a shot.

It is amazing how many uncontested shots the Cork forwards create through driving and dishing the ball into the space behind them. If Dublin’s back six – relatively inexperienced apart from Barry Cahill – can avoid ball watching too much, they can at least challenge the Cork forward artillery.

The other big must for Dublin is that they at least keep on creating the goal chances that they have been racking up with impunity for the last few months.

The forwards have demonstrated a healthy greed in going for goals when they sense the half-chance is on and it is a trait they would do well to carry with them into the summer.

This should be a very fast and exciting game and Cork have the benefit of coming in with no real pressure on them. They won this title last year and went on from there.

Can Dublin do likewise?

Pat Gilroy is, of course, absolutely right in his assertion that nothing other than an All-Ireland final appearance will represent progress from last year.

But winning the league and completing this first chapter of the season unbeaten would send them hurtling into the championship in the right frame of mind.

Dublin’s need for this match and this title is greater than Cork’s and they have sufficient talent to edge it.