No half measures in this quarter

GAELIC GAMES:IT'S HARD to think of a more fascinating match in the GAA All-Ireland football championship to date. Dublin, their apparently inexorable rise through the ratings stalled a little by a disappointing league outcome and a stuttering Leinster final, are face to face with a Tyrone side teetering on the brink of another improvised gallop through the qualifiers, which on the previous two occasions has led all the way to the Sam Maguire.

This evening in Croke Park is a watershed for both teams. It’s hard to see how Dublin in the third year of Pat Gilroy’s management would recover from a quarter-final defeat, which would be a seventh in 10 years, by a team they beat 12 months ago in the most conspicuous demonstration to date that they were a side on the move.

If Tyrone are to lose for a second successive year it would be equally difficult to see the county continuing to push ahead for a fourth All-Ireland without major restructuring. Their quarter-final record isn’t actually hugely more impressive than Dublin’s, even if the counties’ respective achievements in the later stages of the championship don’t bear comparison.

Two teams, then, at different phases of the cycle but both would really struggle to plot a path beyond losing this.

Mickey Harte has strengthened Tyrone by bringing in three experienced players: Justin McMahon, who will give more aerial power in defence than Ryan McMenamin, and Martin Penrose, now deemed fully recovered from a longer than expected injury rehabilitation, and Owen Mulligan, who has a fat CV, full of big shows against Dublin.

Dublin’s set-up is more difficult to read. Cian O’Sullivan’s return after what seems a lifetime of hamstring injury won’t have been decided on a whim and so his fitness won’t be an issue. Match practice is but O’Sullivan’s exceptional mobility and ability to read the game makes the selection understandable.

It looks as if Gilroy has decided to go with a 2-4 formation in defence in order to counter what has become almost a modern attacking norm and has accordingly picked four half backs.

Thereafter it gets complicated. Have Dublin decided to emulate Cork last year by holding back players to finish the match with a stronger 15 than that which starts or is Gilroy either genuinely concerned with injuries or more unusually, naming a dummy team?

Rumours yesterday were that Barry Cahill and Michael Dara Macauley would start, possibly in place of Eamonn Fennell and maybe Eoghan O’Gara, whose wrist injury may have recovered more quickly than expected but the plaster is only just off. Nonetheless he was a totemic figure in last year’s win, scoring the decisive goal.

Fennell, however, gave a top-class display against Tyrone in the NFL in Omagh the April before last – the same day that O’Sullivan and Rory O’Carroll were strikingly good as the centre of the defence – and maybe that’s an influence.

Dublin have to be able to contest this from the start, as they did last year. Bad things have happened to the team in the early stages of quarter-finals in recent years: missing scoring opportunities on an industrial scale against Tyrone in 2008 and conceding a goal to Colm Cooper within seconds of the throw-in against Kerry the following year – both matches that culminated in woeful thrashings.

Tyrone have stretched their stride in the qualifiers, absorbing what Roscommon had in the first half last week before striding away in the second half. Justin McMahon would have probably helped to tighten the defence a bit earlier had he been fully fit and so they won’t be as accommodating today.

Key to the outcome will be Bernard Brogan’s form. If the lapse from his high standards as seen against Wexford continues, the game is over but otherwise it is expected Conor Gormley will be given the job of marking him.

Alan Brogan’s use of the ball, excellent so far this season, will also be critical to Dublin’s need to take scores economically. The Leinster champions may resent the charge but they are seen in some quarters as not entirely reliable in big match situations when under pressure and that is an issue they must dispose of.

It can be done. Tyrone have come together nicely. Seán Cavanagh is in better form this year at centrefield, although his best stuff against Dublin has tended to come on the wing. Penrose and Mulligan will add proven quality to an attack where relative newcomer Peter Harte has been settling in impressively.

But Dublin are all about things that they will need to prove their opponents are not as well equipped with any more: pace, movement and dynamism, work-rate and implacability. They weren’t impressed with the view that Tyrone’s 17 wides last year somehow demeaned the victory, seeing in it instead the result of pressure and relentless marking.

They controlled centrefield last year through Stephen Cluxton’s kick-outs, while Tyrone conceded tracts of territory by re-starting short all the time – a neat explanation of this was that they were practising for Cork in the semi-final on the basis that there would be no point in kicking out long to the waiting Rebel behemoths.

Dublin have the capacity to turn the screw and find the limits of Tyrone’s appetite. Anything less than a full court press in conditions that will be disturbingly similar to three years ago and Harte’s team will feed on the indecision with their experience and killer instincts.

Dublin to push on.