The Dublin defence and midfield must stop panicking

GAA; THE MIDDLE THIRD:Dublin needed to win a tight game where they didn't play well just to get a reminder of what is going to be needed if they want to win an All-Ireland

DESPITE THE fact they cost me a few bob by not beating the spread on Sunday, I’m feeling better about Dublin this week than a lot of people seem to be. I actually think their narrow win over Wexford will stand to them much better than if they’d beaten them by a dozen points.

I would say that the way the season has been going, Dublin needed to win a tight game where they didn’t play well just to remind them of what is going to be needed from them if they want to win an All Ireland. Pat Gilroy learned plenty about his team, that’s for sure.

If he’s worried about anything after it, he’ll be most concerned with the fact that from midfield back to goalkeeper, the best player they had at any point in the game was Barry Cahill – and he didn’t arrive on to the pitch until the 50th minute. Whatever about the full-forward line being out of sorts, the way Dublin play calls for their defenders to be composed and clever on the ball when they get it. Outside of Cahill – and, in fairness to him, young James McCarthy for his goal – Dublin’s defenders and midfielders were panicky and unsure of themselves.

That needs to be fixed.

Obviously, Bernard Brogan’s bad day at the office stuck out like a sore thumb and he’s got plenty of criticism for his shooting on Sunday. To be honest, I don’t there’s anything really to worry about – he’s such a top-class player he won’t be that poor again in a hurry. The one thing I would change in Bernard is I’d just get him to be more careful with the shots he takes on.

Funny enough, the most reckless shot he took actually went over the bar with the very first attack of the game. I would have still given out to him at half-time or afterwards even though it went over. Poor shot selection is still poor shot selection even if it ends in a point. Bernard kept shooting for the rest of the day, obviously feeling he couldn’t miss after that first one went over. But that was a shot that will come off once in every six or seven attempts.

In a way, you can’t blame him. You can’t really hold him responsible when I’d say every team he’s ever played for has relied on him to run up a score. Underage, club, county – every game he’s played, he’s been expected and encouraged to keep shooting. Why get a guard dog and then give out to him when he barks?

He’ll be better the next day and so will Dublin. I’d be more worried for them if they’d breezed through on Sunday. They’ve come through plenty of Leinster finals celebrating and roaring and shouting about it. They looked more professional afterwards on Sunday, more focused on what’s ahead of them. It will stand to them, I have no doubt.

They’re still there, still in the mix of teams who should be around at the end. Cork, Kerry and Dublin are still the big three, although after Saturday night, I think we can add Kildare in there as well

You judge a team by whether or not one of the big three would fancy meeting them and I can guarantee you that none of them wants a piece of Kildare.

They’ve righted the wides problem they had at the start of the year and in Tomás O’Connor they look to have a big, awkward full forward who will do damage. They don’t dilly-dally out the field either – they get good, quick ball into the full-forward line and take it from there.

Laois couldn’t handle them in the qualifier on Saturday night and it meant that for Justin McNulty and his team the year ended with a whimper. That end, when it comes, can be kind of shocking for players in all counties.

I remember being at the Irish Open in Killarney last year on the Friday night and you could easily tell the fellas who’d made the cut from the ones who hadn’t. It comes quickly and you have to move on to the next event straight away, but it must be tough to watch the show go on without you while you’re packing your bags.

I was lucky enough when I was playing in that the last year when Kerry’s summer ended really early was 1999. Cork beat us in the Munster final in the middle of July and the back door hadn’t been invented yet so that was that. You’re left at a complete loss. You can’t bring yourself to watch any games or engage with the rest of the championship at all. I remember spending the rest of that summer putting down a lot of late nights and not a whole lot else.

Nearly half the teams are gone out of the championship now – you wouldn’t blame any of the lads involved for doing the same as I did. They’ll be annoyed – at themselves, at their management, at the county board, at anything and everything. They’ll be wondering where to go to from here. At some point, they’ll find the positives and decide they’ll do it better next year. We won’t know until then whether they meant it or not.

Take a team like Laois. Okay, they went out to a hiding from Kildare but you could argue it wasn’t the worst year they’ve put in. They got promotion to Division One, they picked up two wins in the championship against Longford and Tipperary. They lost two games but those two games were against Dublin and Kildare, which is a tough draw in any man’s language. No other county has had to play two of the top four contenders for the All-Ireland apart from Laois. There are very few teams in the country that would have come out the other side.

So Laois players can take some heart. They’re not at the level of Kildare yet, but then they haven’t had their manager, Justin McNulty, in place for as long as Kieran McGeeney has been in Kildare. I would back them to find some form next year.

On the other hand, a team like Galway barely have anything to cling to outside of their under-21 success. They’ve had a really poor year – a shocking league followed by a championship where they never raised a gallop.

They’re still too dependent on Pádraic Joyce. Even at the end of their qualifier against Meath on Saturday, everybody saw that they had a goal chance at the end. What I couldn’t understand was how everyone fixated on the fact the pass to Cormac Bane was too low. As far as I could see, it was the wrong pass to play altogether because Joyce was free inside to the right. If the ball had been slipped to him, I assure you it would have been goodnight and good luck.

Maybe this under-21 generation will bring a new era to Galway football but they’re going to be starting from a very low place. That’s the thing with going out of the championship at this point of the year. Morale is going to be low, grounds for optimism even lower.

Even in a county that has had a lot of underage success recently – Tipperary, for instance – even there it feels a bit like clutching for straws to say they’re making strides at minor and under-21.

Tipperary will be judged on what they do at senior level and the truth of it is they’re getting nowhere near Cork and Kerry. John Evans has been there a while and has done plenty of good work but realistically, they’re not even giving the big teams in Munster the sort of games Limerick have been giving them. It’s very hard to see how they’re going to progress, especially with the hurlers taking all the glory in the county.

Every county has different troubles.

You take a county like Fermanagh that has just been through one of the worst years in its history. How do they pick it up from here? Obviously, they’ll have to work on getting everybody in the county back on the same page again and bringing players back into the fold but it’s going to be very tough after such a terrible season. As we saw at the weekend, London were no great shakes in the end. The next six months in Fermanagh will be all about getting their house back in order. They’re not as poor as they showed this year.

The big result from the qualifiers on Saturday night came up in Armagh, with Wicklow proving for the umpteenth time that Mick O’Dwyer is a special man. We’ve seen it a million times from teams of Micko’s, groups of players that he gets to defy the odds. I would say he loved all the obituaries that appeared in last Saturday’s papers about him. That sort of stuff is perfect for him.

The man is such a competitor. Bomber Liston told me a story once about back when Micko was over Kerry and Bomber was getting fit after being out through injury. Micko used to train with him on the beach down in Waterville, getting him running through sand to get his strength up. They used to race up to a particular gate and even though Micko was a good 20 years older than Bomber, he kept himself very well through the years and generally won the races.

Except on this one day when Bomber actually had the upper hand coming near to the end. But just with about 15 yards to go, Bomber went down with a twisted ankle. Bear in mind now that Bomber was one of Kerry’s most important players at the time and Micko was his manager.

Didn’t matter.

Micko made sure to run on and touch the gate before he came back to see if his big full forward was alright. The manager in him and the competitor in him were one and the same.

That’s what has kept him performing miracles for all these years.

If I was on the Armagh team bus coming down the road to Aughrim on Saturday afternoon, I would be very nervous about what lay in wait for me.

PS: The highlight of the whole weekend for any GAA fan was obviously Joe Canning’s no-look handpass for Galway against Cork. Some guys can just do things the rest of us can only gasp at. If I ever tried something like that, I’d be hearing about it for a year afterwards. And not in a good way.