Dublin on the brink of becoming one of great Irish sports teams

All-Ireland SFC Final: Dublin v Mayo, Croke Park, Sunday, 3.30pm

The curse of attaining the status of a great team is the instinct it creates in the rest of us to assert that actually you're not that great after all. If we spent the rest of the summer picking holes in most teams with the determination we apply to the task when Dublin are on the slate, there'd be a lot of snotty letters sent in from Outraged of Oughterard and Belligerent of Bellaghy.

We don’t though. We accentuate the positives when it comes to 99 per cent of the counties, which is actually the worst kind of damning with faint praise. This team’s system makes them hard to beat, that crowd have a serious free-taker who will keep them in it long enough to have a puncher’s chance, SuchAndSuch Park is a tough place to go. Most of the time, we’re reaching.

But with Dublin, the parlour game all year is finding the weakness that will cause the edifice to crumble. We were handed a pair of them in early spring this time around, with the defection of Jack McCaffrey and Rory O’Carroll. That’ll cost them eventually, we said. Has to.

Well, we're 70 minutes from eventually and they haven't missed a beat yet. Defeat Mayo tomorrow and their status as one of the great Irish sports teams is assured. You have to go back to 2010 to find an All-Ireland final that didn't feature any two from Dublin, Mayo, Kerry and Donegal so we can say that those four counties have been consistently an ocean clear of the rest. Win tomorrow and Dublin will separate themselves finally and definitively from that elite.

The beauty of Jim Gavin and his team this year has been to recognise that you never stand in the same river twice. People move on, the game moves on, Dublin move on. They are a subtly different team this year. Still physical, still methodical, still brutally economic in front of the posts. But the loss of McCaffrey in particular has changed how they go about building a score.

Of the 18 goals Dublin scored in the 2015 championship, McCaffrey was involved to a greater or lesser extent in nine. He scored one, had the last pass for two others, carried at pace between the 45s to take out opposition players for five (5!) more and laid off a handpass to start a move that led to another. You don’t just hand the jersey to the next guy and expect to carry on as normal. Not all animals are equal.

Dublin have scored just five goals in 2016. And yet their average score total per game has not fallen away. By any means. In 2015, they scored 18-118 over seven games, an average return of 24.6 points per game. In 2016, they’re on 5-98 after five games – or 22.6 points per game. Once they’d lost the footballer of the year, they looked for alternative cat-skinning methods. Taking your points and waiting for the goals to come isn’t such an old-fashioned notion after all.

Argument

So what argument can be made for Mayo here? Oddly enough, there are a few. It has been said, with plenty of justification, that they haven’t been impressive through the qualifiers. But anyone watching them can see that in 2016, they haven’t been sent out to impress.

For one thing, they have enough players who’ve done enough impressing and they know by now that it’s for the birds. All those games where they blew Sligo and Galway and Donegal to smithereens, what were they for? Who were they going to blow to smithereens in late August or September?

Instead, under Stephen Rochford, they are built to (a) not concede goals and (b) tailor their approach for each specific day. They've given up three goals in seven games so they're getting somewhere with the first part. As for the second, we'll see what they come with.

Rochford has taken a measure of their adventure out and replaced it with the sort of flintiness that has been missing on the days when their hearts were most badly broken. The question now is whether that buys them anything more than a two- or three-point defeat in which they are in touch all the way without ever making a burst at winning. This, it hardly needs pointing out, is an entirely feasible scenario.

Containment

It looks inevitable that Mayo’s initial approach will be containment of a sort. It seems unlikely that they played a sweeper all year to abandon it in the All-Ireland final – against Dublin of all teams.

That leaves them with five forwards, which either means Cian O’Sullivan gets an armchair ride at centre-back or Philly McMahon goes score-hunting when the mood takes him. Neither is good.

Ultimately, the nagging feeling when it comes to Mayo is not particularly different to what it was midway through the 2012 and 2013 finals. You look at their forwards and you try to find enough scores and you struggle. Maybe Cillian O'Connor has a day of days, maybe Aidan O'Shea gets on the end of a high one at the edge of the square, maybe Andy Moran beats the sweeper to get enough possession for three or four points. Maybe, maybe, maybe. But you're reaching.

With Dublin, there’s no reach. They are what they are, they will do what they will do. Even if it’s close with 10 minutes to go, how could you back against them? This will be their 60th game under Gavin. Only 17 of them have been close – a margin of three points or less. Only four have gone against them. It is difficult to argue that this will be a fifth.

Greatness by a couple or three.