Dublin's priority is to avoid being champions who went down

ON SUNDAY, Dublin face Waterford in Dungarvan in the last round of the National Hurling League, knowing victory would ensure they meet the same opponents a fortnight later in a straight fight to remain in Division One A.

It’s straight-forward now: they want to avoid becoming the first county that goes from winning the league to being dumped out of it a year later.

“You don’t want that stigma attached to you,” said Ryan O’Dwyer yesterday. “Look, we know what we need to do this weekend and two weeks after that; but at the end of the day it’s all about the championship.

“Our aim is an All-Ireland, but we don’t want that thing attached to us that, ‘Oh, you got relegated but you won the All-Ireland’. We want to build on it. We want to get clapped out into a Division One A first round game next year after winning the All-Ireland.”

A winless campaign thus far, it has at least unearthed more young talent. O’Dwyer’s dismissal for a second yellow during that 11-goal frenzy down in Kilkenny a few weeks ago forced others to lead the line.

“What was great about it was lads stepping up to the plate. Eamonn Dillon, ‘Trollier’, coming on there and catching a ball over Paul Murphy’s head and bagging a goal. It shows there is someone special there. He’s an outstanding character.

“Danny Sutcliffe, like, he goes out one week and plays wing back against Galway and plays a stormer. Goes out against Cork and John Gardiner is taken off. How often do you see that?

“I was joking with Danny in the showers after and I said, ‘Jeez, when I was playing with Tipp, John Gardiner finished my Tipp career, you’re after finishing his Cork career’.”

He quickly realises it may be construed poorly along the River Lee: “Well, Jesus, I’ll come up against Gardiner now later in the year and he’ll kill me! And Tommy Walsh the next week.

“It just shows he’s [Sutcliffe] got a cockiness in the right manner. He doesn’t care who he’s marking, he’s going to deliver.”

Still, O’Dwyer believes his sending off is a contributing factor in Dublin finding themselves on the brink of relegation.

“I’m taking personal responsibility for that; it was my stupidity that got us in that position in the first place. I think we would have won that game but for me. I’ll have to redeem myself.”