It was probably surprising because it was so straightforward. After Dublin’s defeat on Saturday, manager Dessie Farrell dropped the curtain on six years of management, the culmination, as he put it, of nearly 40 years of involvement with his county teams.
There was no, ‘this isn’t the time, lads’ equivocation. He had already let it be known to county officials that this year would be his last.
“The time has come,” he said. “It has come to a natural end. It has been one of the greatest privileges in my life to be involved with this group and the other group of senior teams over the last number of years. Some special people involved, not just players, but in the backroom team, the coaches, and not just at senior level, but in my own career as a coach.”
His tenure in charge of Dublin was immensely challenging: the ultimate ‘follow that’ task of taking over from the management of Jim Gavin, which had landed six All-Irelands in seven years, including the historic and no longer mythical five-in-a-row.
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Farrell must have known that extending that sequence to six would be a thankless achievement. He would either have won Sam Maguire with someone else’s team or squandered the opportunity.
He became the third guiding figure in Dublin’s resurgent decade after the foundational Pat Gilroy and the unprecedented gold rush of the Jim Gavin years. Curiously, Farrell is actually the oldest of the three, who were all born in 1971 but who took charge in reverse chronological order, having been born in November, July and June respectively.
Farrell’s achievements at under-age made him an obvious candidate to take on the senior job. Not only was in charge for the county’s most recent All-Irelands at minor (2012) and under-21 (2017) – so far, nothing at under-20 – but his work with the 1993 cohort gave him a critical role in developing players who would have key roles in the successes of the 2010s.
So, the idea that he found himself in charge of an All-Ireland winning machine needs to be tempered by reflecting on where the players came from.
Nobody could have foreseen the weird circumstances in which that All-Ireland was won: an empty Croke Park in the Covid-ridden winter championship of 2020.
This was still going to be a transitional process – and not a rewarding one, as a gifted generation took its leave on an incrementally annual basis. Farrell shouldered the burden, introducing new players to replenish the team but given the impossibility of replacing the departing cohort, he was effectively managing decline.
He did the state some service, performing the last squeeze on a generation he had helped to produce, the 1993s, and winning an All-Ireland as prized as any, in 2023, in a pure enactment of Paradise Regained. In that he was helped by the re-commitment of Paul Mannion and Jack McCaffrey, who he had lost sequentially in 2020 and ’21.
In a characteristically deadpan interview on Dubs TV after a county championship match in September 2022, Farrell announced – towards the end – that the pair had indicated an intention to rejoin the panel. Months later, Stephen Cluxton also returned.
It was a rare splash of good fortune in his management and 2023 became a crusade to win back the All-Ireland and to get captain James McCarthy up the steps of the Hogan to accept Sam Maguire.
In filmic parlance, it was getting the old gang together for one last job. Delivering hugely anticipated All-Ireland titles is not easily done and comes with intense pressure but Farrell managed to do it twice.
In the down years of 2021 and ’22, the team lost focus. The notorious Covid breach in that first year didn’t help and resulted in a pre-emptive 12-week suspension handed down by Dublin GAA. There was a strong sense that Farrell was literally taking one for the team, even allowing for the GAA policy of penalising managers if teams broke public health rules to train collectively.
One recurring misfortune was the fitness of Con O’Callaghan, joint-captain of the 2017 under-21 champions and later senior captain but always the torch bearer for the youngest generation feeding into the team. Had he not been injured in 2022, might a one-point defeat by Kerry in that year’s All-Ireland semi-final have been overturned?
This year was always going to be challenging for Dublin. It started promisingly with an All-Ireland club title for Cuala in January and the excitement of the new FRC rules – an ambient irony with Farrell facing his taxing final season, as Hosannas rang out for his predecessor as the saviour of football.
Last year the team ran out of steam in the All-Ireland quarter-finals, losing a championship match to Galway for the first time in 90 years. Farrell then had the reverse experience of 2022, as Mannion and McCaffrey ended their intercounty careers, as did two of the record-holding nine-time All-Ireland medallists, James McCarthy and Michael Fitzsimons, albeit at an age when they owed Dublin nothing.
There was also the fifth loss of Brian Fenton, another of the ’93s and still more than young enough to continue but he had put in an intense 10 years, not losing a championship match until the seventh season of his career and winning seven All-Irelands, six All Stars and two FOTY awards.
Farrell had to process that scale of departure – the oldest of the lot, the 43-year-old Cluxton, has remained but the odds must be on him following the manager and removing another chunk of intellectual capital from the dressingroom.
“I know there’s challenges with underage in the county at the minute or over the last number of years,” said Farrell on Saturday, “but there’s a great crop after coming in there and I’d be very optimistic for how they go about their business in the seasons ahead.”
Arguably, the supply line came to a halt in 2019 and it was noted at the time that Jim Gavin, who had a terrific knack of adding a new player every year to freshen up the team and none of his anointed choices failed to become regular first-teamers, had been unable that year to find an up-and-coming footballer to supplement the side.
Under-age titles aren’t everything and a swathe of players from the last decade did not have those medals but those who followed had been part of both Gavin’s and Farrell’s winners at under-21 and minor.
The next team from the capital to lift Sam Maguire may well feature nobody with an All-Ireland medal.
Dubliners haven’t been unreasonable about all of this. There’s a current generation in their 20s who have seen the county contest nine All-Ireland finals and win all of them. To have watched the previous nine, a follower would have to have been in their 80s.
It has been a joyous decade and a half but now is the time for hard work to maintain the tradition.
