GAELIC GAMES:While Donegal are singled out for their defensive tactics, Pat Gilroy has gradually evolved his own 15-man system for Dublin, tightening up his side and in the process making them harder to beat, writes MALACHY CLERKIN
THE SOUNDTRACK to this one carries like the jangle of keys on a prison warden’s hip. Dublin players puff out their cheeks when they talk about Donegal. Indeed, they don’t talk about Donegal, they talk about the Donegal system. Lots of men back, hands in everywhere, no room for ballet. They won’t just park the bus, they’ll plant the whole fleet in a line across their 45 and dare Dublin to find a way over them or around them. It’s gonna be Shawshank stuff, with a whole lot of tunnel to crawl through before they can be free.
Yet, the greatest trick Dublin have pulled in the build-up to this semi-final has been to convince the world that only one team will be playing to a defensive system tomorrow. Remark to Pat Gilroy that it’s going to be a tactical affair since they too pour back behind the ball a fair amount and he bristles ever-so slightly.
“Well your suggestion there is that we do the same,” he says. “I don’t think we do the same. I think you could say that about every team. Every team is bringing men back when you lose possession. But I think we play it very differently to Donegal. There’s big differences in what is actually happening on the field.”
Tactics are in the eye of the beholder, of course. When Kieran McGeeney analysed Dublin’s system after Kildare’s one-point defeat in the Leinster semi-final, he said that “every time you get into their 50 there’s going to be eight men to go around”.
When James McCartan left Dublin after their league game back in April, he had to reflect on a game that at one point in the closing 10 minutes saw every player on the pitch bar the Down goalkeeper camped inside the Dublin half. “Never thought I’d come to Croke Park and find that Jedward would be the highlight of the evening,” he said afterwards.
These systems, they get a bad name. Even now, eight years after Tyrone’s gave it the full Ride Of The Valkyries treatment against Kerry, they carry a bit of a stigma still. Truth is, they’re vital – to Donegal and to Dublin – and without them, we’d be watching two different teams lining up tomorrow.
One of the first things Gilroy did with his new squad upon taking over the Dublin job was to head away on a training sortie to La Manga in January 2009. And among the first communal DVD-watching experiences they went through as a group sitting in a room was a collection of clips from the 12-point defeat to Tyrone the previous August.
What screamed out was the lack of pressure on Tyrone players delivering ball into their forwards from distance. First principles under the new regime would be to change that.
“It was there right from the start in some form or other,” says Shane Ryan, who was on the panel that first year before moving on to the hurlers.
“Obviously it has evolved a good bit since then. But there was always a big push for it. I remember playing in one of the first league matches that Pat was in charge for and all you could hear right through the game from the sideline was this constant shout of, ‘Get back, get back, get back.’ That was the message that was drilled into us.
“His big thing was getting fellas back when the opposition had the ball. And it was aimed purely at Tyrone and Kerry. Nobody in Leinster was able to beat us but we would concede big scores to the likes of Tyrone and Kerry and this was aimed to stop that happening.
“Dublin had won four Leinsters in a row at that stage. It was outside of Leinster that the problems were. There was always good enough players in Dublin to get scores, even against the Tyrones and Kerrys. But the problem was conceding the big scores.”
Paul Griffin has had to watch every kick of the championship from the sideline, another player swept away on the wave of the cruciate injuries this summer. He’s been around the whole way through Gilroy’s reign and was around the one that preceded it too. For him, the change in emphasis when the St Vincent’s man arrived was obvious and it was necessary.
“Each manager comes in with his own ideas about how they want to play the game,” he says. “Pat came in on the back of how we’d been beaten by Tyrone.
“We were very open to doing something different and trying a new way of approaching things. Dublin up to then had played some quite nice, open, flowing football and I guess it left us exposed on certain occasions. This was about tightening things up and making ourselves harder to beat.
“From a defensive point of view, all 15 players are involved as opposed to just letting the defenders take care of that side of things. But it’s not just us who do it. Kerry have worked hard on that side of things going back a few years now and Tyrone have always had it. You saw last Sunday that Colm Cooper was getting involved back up the pitch and getting a hand in. It does make such a difference to defences when forwards are making it a harder job for the other side.”
Naturally, it took a while to bed in and they shipped a few meaty totals in that year’s league. Tyrone scored 1-18, Derry 0-20, Galway 3-12 and Kerry 1-15. Bit by bit they inched along the road to where Gilroy wanted them. Every man contributing, regardless of the number on his back. Every man putting in more than just effort as well. Any fool can sweat, after all.
“The idea was that it would be more than just getting back,” says Ryan. “You had to do more than just be an extra body there. It wasn’t ‘get back’, it was ‘get back and tackle someone’. If you had three extra fellas back just covering space, Tyrone and Kerry were good enough just to play around you. It didn’t bother them at all.
“You had to get a handle on a man, you had to slow him up and disrupt him. And if he handed the ball off to a fella five yards away, you better follow the ball and tackle that man as well. That had to be drilled into fellas, particularly half-forwards. They would rather see you get back and dispossess somebody than to score a point yourself.”
Though the system broke down against Kerry later that year, it was personnel rather than principle that left them in the lurch that day. The failure was one of mindset and had nothing to do with where players stationed themselves on the pitch. Gilroy knew going into 2010 that the foundations had been set.
Dublin needed to work on the mental side of things but when it came to committing to a system of play, they were in business.
“You have to be prepared to work back,” says Barry Cahill, centre half-forward in tomorrow’s programme but just as likely to be handling ball back around Ger Brennan’s patch. Cahill has played in most positions for Dublin and part of the reason he can is that positions just don’t mean as much as they used to. That’s how the system works.
“You can’t just stay in the opposition half and wait for good ball to come in to you. You have to work hard off the ball and these days teams have very good half-backs who are very good moving forward with the ball. It is very similar to playing in midfield, particularly in open play. You’re trying to get the ball off the half backs and full backs and link things up by getting good ball into the lads inside like Diarmuid Connolly and Bernard Brogan who do most of the damage.”
All of which isn’t a million miles removed from what Donegal do. Granted, they probably invite teams onto them more than Dublin do and don’t have quite the quality of kick-passers that Dublin can call on and hence can’t run up the same scores. But the basics are the same. Get men back, break up play, attack at speed and feed the two men inside.
Connolly and Bernard Brogan have kicked 43 per cent of Dublin’s scores this summer; Michael Murphy and Colm McFadden have kicked 38 per cent of Donegal’s. The disparity isn’t huge by any means, yet most of the talk going into tomorrow is of Donegal’s system, as if they were the only ones implementing one.
The best card players fool the rest of the table in thinking they’re playing a different game. Gilroy’s chip stack is rising by the round.
