Knight's lesson needs to dawn on Dublin

Keith Duggan/Sideline Cut: It is at this time of year that you get to understand the game. Gaelic football is not really about Croke Park. Those July days of flags and beer and sunshine and 80,000 country people all arranging to meet outside Café Kylemore at midday have a fantastic tint.

They are simply too grand and fleeting to be properly absorbed. No, the truth of the game is more about February Sundays in Castlebar, when those fans that wanted could wander on to the pitch and engage John Maughan in the here and the now of a splendid day for Mayo football.

The game is about James Nallen scooting across the eternally clogged exit road from McHale Park, still in his Mayo shorts and his gear-bag slung across his shoulder, darting among the cars of the people who had come here to watch him play.

And it is about the Dublin camp pleading for the return of at least four footballs that somehow went missing during the warm-up. It is unlikely those four Baile Átha Cliath mementoes will see fields beyond Bohola or Burrishoole any time in the future.

And it is about Tommy Lyons in an empty corridor, tired and dispirited and a million miles away from the soaring, tremulous suburban thrills that he conducted with a flourish on the sidelines of the Jones's Road stadium in the broiling summer of 2002.

If they were even whispering in the Dublin dressing-room on Sunday, then those whispers were low. Behind that door was funereally quiet. Lyons came out to answer a few soft questions in muted and polite fashion and then softly slunk back into his dressing-room.

The game, even on glamorous All-Ireland occasions, remains intensely local. But Lyons is in charge of the one exception; the unwieldy, slippery and complex football phantasm that is Dublin, less a team than an issue. Lyons is in charge of Dublin and on days when Dublin score three points in an entire match, even if it is in the parched lands of the West, the spirit of Big Jim Larkin gushes through the clubhouses in the suburbs. There is a mood for civil unrest, for upheaval, for lockout.

Leaving McHale Park, I began to wonder how perilous Lyons's position would be now had Tyrone, the All-Ireland champions, steamrolled Dublin in the opening league game in Parnell Park. Without any advance warning, the stakes of the league have become inexplicably higher this season. The degree of emphasis and tension being placed on every game (with the jovial exception of Mick O'Dwyer) is acute. Mickey Harte is responsible for this. Mickey is so wrapped up in the league he hasn't found time to shave since September. And if the manager of the champions says the league matters, then people tend to notice.

Last year represented the difficult-second-album syndrome for Lyons. It was a year that just went ragged. Now, he needs to tinker a little with his team but at the same time is aware of the hot, anxious breath of the Dublin faithful who see in shining league results evidence that all will be well when they return to the posh new Hill in the summer.

For some reason, Bobby Knight came into mind as I thought about Lyons's predicament. Years ago, a famous book was written about Knight called A Season on the Brink. It must have been the title that triggered the connection between both sports coaches.

Knight is an American college basketball coach who is legendary for his unorthodox brilliance in the field of coaching and his astonishing and frequently insane method of dealing with society at large. To say Knight has a hot temper is like saying Shane McGowan is fond of a sherry.

Last week, Knight was in the news for verbally attacking a staff colleague at Texas Tech who came up to congratulate him on a league win while the coach stood at a salad bar in the canteen. Because the coach felt he heard "lately" tagged on to the end of "you're doin' pretty good", he lost it, clenching his fists and frothing. But then this is a man who cursed a student for bumping into him, who deposited another student in a dustbin, who sent chairs flying across court on national television and who regularly reduced players to tears over many seasons at his former house of glory in Indiana. Women colleagues have reported him as chauvinistic and unpleasant and he is woefully ill-equipped to deal with the new order of political correctness.

America is divided on Knight. Half the population feels he is an over-indulged bully with prehistoric social mores whose continuing presence at the helm of college sports is an embarrassment. Others believe that despite his short fuse, he is a rare paragon of discipline and old-fashioned authority in an era when both pillars have disintegrated. Although some of Knight's former players have railed against him, more revere him.

His signature note at Indiana was that no player had his name stencilled onto the back of his shirt. Knight thought that was rubbish. The team was everything. In fact, he often said, "you do not play against the opposition, you play against the game of basketball." That explains his reductive attitude towards people; they are mere props in the grand plan of the game and when they refuse to move and go as he instructs, hell yes, he swears and froths and places human beings in recycling dumpsters.

Anyway, I have often dreamt about the possibility of a Bobby Knight-type figure emerging on the GAA scene and more specifically on the Dublin football managerial scene (and do seriously believe that a top-flight basketball coach would make a lightning and unprecedented impact on general Gaelic football coaching philosophy), a man who genuinely does not give a damn for anything or anybody.

A man who, say, if he were to read an unflattering column about himself in the Evening Herald penned by a former Dublin hero, might be inclined to personally visit that former hero's desk, scream at him for several minutes and then demand that the hero eat, in front of anybody, the offending column. Yes, a genuine and gargantuan eccentric in charge of the Blues, a tough man who scares people.

Tommy Lyons is tough but in a rubber-ball kind of way and is too fond of company to truly scare people. Charm has been his calling card over the years but it is a hard skill to summon with the vultures circling overhead. And he cares about Dublin football, he cares deeply; you could see it in his face last Sunday. Why else would he be doing this job? Another bad game or two and the ground under Lyons's feet will feel scorched just as it did for all the other men who have tried to carve out a place alongside Kevin Heffernan.

But it would be reactive and unfair and pointless to assemble the firing squad for Lyons just now. He and his team are in too deep together. They would all do well to pay heed to Knight, though. All Dublin must do is forget about what being Dublin means and figure out how to play against the game itself. If they can manage that, the rest will slot into place.

Anyway, Bob Knight could never work as the manager of Dublin. He insists on wearing a red sweater at all games as his emblem. The city fans are confused enough nowadays as it is.