Patient Dublin sound the death knell for blanket defence

DEATH NOTICE - Croke Park, Jones' Road, Dublin 3 – August 27th 2017

The death has taken place of the Gaelic football tactic known as the massed blanket defence.

After a struggle that lasted over a decade, it passed on peacefully and placidly in the end, expiring in the arms of the Dublin football team. It is survived by . . .

Well, it will be interesting to see who it is survived by when 2018 comes around. Nobody with designs on winning an All-Ireland, surely.

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This had the feel of a decisive statement, the point in a courtroom drama where the prosecutor turns to the judge and says with a lawyerly flourish: “No further questions, your honour.”

If Mickey Harte’s Tyrone, designed with such precision and built with such steel, if that Tyrone can’t give Dublin a game in an All-Ireland semi-final, then the verdict on setting up a team this way is damning.

There may have been reasonable doubt back in 2014 but Jim Gavin’s side have long since extinguished it.

Tyrone’s game has been predicated for some time now on the competing life goals of the spider and the fly. Come into our parlour, they say. ‘Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy’.

And when they’re playing against other Ulster teams, they tend to find suggestible little flies who hold out for a time but eventually wander in, either for lack of patience or options or both. By dint of being better, stronger, swifter and more ruthless than the rest of them, they’ve put Ulster titles back to back. Tyrone’s average winning margin over Ulster teams through the past two summers is just below nine points.

Which is all very well, right up until the point at which the fly refuses to play along. Dublin have had two years, 11 months and 27 days to come up with a gameplan for playing against a massed blanket defence and everything they do is predicated on one simple rule – no stepping into the parlour until the parlour has been secured.

Blanket defence football is counter-attacking football. When it wins games, that’s how it wins them. Suck ’em in, turn ’em over, make ’em pay. Flying columns bursting out of defence, creating overlaps, scrambling the senses of the back-pedalling opposition. But if you can’t suck ’em in and you can’t turn ’em over, what then?

Rare jewel

This. This is what. The official stats say that Dublin had 63 per cent possession here. For Tyrone to have a chance, they needed Dublin to risk giving up that possession. But they didn’t. They guarded the ball like it was a rare jewel. If and when they found their route to goal blocked, they turned and started again.

Dublin are, on this evidence, one of the best-coached teams in the history of the game. They have the nous to come up with a plan and the discipline to stick with it. Nobody grew up dreaming of being a patient footballer. Yet they did it here as if it was the most fun you could have with your boots on.

Winning is the thing. Dublin do not care if you are not entertained. They do not worry if they have to go back into their own half. They are not precious about your aesthetic desires. They are brutally, devastatingly functional and there is nothing a counter-attacking team can do about it.

They made the pitch so wide, it must have felt to Tyrone here like it stretched from Jones’s Road to the East Link Bridge. When they attacked, they posted two players on either sideline, close enough to the stands that they would have caught a whiff of the hot-dog belches coming from the front row. Generally, it was Jack McCaffrey and Paddy Andrews down the left flank and Niall Scully and Dean Rock down the right.

Clogging the middle

Tyrone’s vaunted defensive system is all about clogging up the middle – and clog it up they did. But Dublin’s movement, passing and running was constant and, crucially, it was all out around the margins. They attacked Tyrone like they were a pie just out of the oven – taking a little chunk here and there from the outer edges until the centre is cool enough to swallow whole.

Pass, pass, pass. Move, move, move. Eventually, a Tyrone player would leave a running lane a little more open than he should and a Dublin player would zip in and make a chance. For a finish, they were callously accurate. Paddy Andrews nailed two back-to-back points early on, neither of them easy, neither of them a doubt. They only kicked two wides all day, one of them a goal chance that Jack McCaffrey blazed wide at the Canal End.

At one stage in the second half, Tyrone kicked two scores on the bounce to reduce the margin to six points. The points came from Colm Cavanagh and Niall Sludden and they were picture-perfect both, of high enough quality to rouse the Tyrone support into imagining there might still be something in the game for them. It was a stretch but you wouldn’t begrudge anyone a dream in late August.

Dublin’s next point typified the day. From Stephen Cluxton’s kick-out, the ball went through 19 pairs of Dublin hands. Down the left flank through McCaffrey and Mick Fitzsimons, back into the centre and over to the right with Kilkenny in and out of the play like the writing through a stick of rock. Back into the middle again with Kevin McManamon insinuating himself into it now and then as well before Paul Flynn came on a burst and split the posts on the run from 35 metres out.

Tyrone had no answer. They were never able to break out of their own self-designed straitjacket. Instead, when they went on the attack and Dublin filtered back in numbers themselves, they had none of the structure or patience Dublin had and frequently got caught up in traffic and turned over. Turned out Dublin were the spider all along.

So what now? This result means that eight of the nine Ulster teams have shipped at least an eight-point beating in the 2017 championship. Tyrone, the best of the best at this style of the game, have been found out at the highest level. This style of football might work in Clones but it is increasingly of little use in Croke Park.

If nothing else, Ulster football has a lot of questions to examine over the winter.