GAA: THE MIDDLE THIRD:I was lucky to get a ticket for the Champions League final and was impressed by how Barca work hard and honestly for each other. It's something you'll see repeated this weekend
I HAD the good luck to get to Wembley over the weekend for the Champions League final. At Farranfore on Saturday morning, there were about 20 lads in the airport heading over with two tickets between them.
People were travelling to London in hope more than anything – and it was the same when you got to the stadium. If there was 87,000 inside the ground when the game started,
I’d say there was another 40,000 outside.
The buzz was really amazing, the energy in the city was through the roof. Felt a lot like last year’s All-Ireland final day. That’s something that I guess always just washed over me when I was playing. The hype of the big days was for supporters, not players.
As a United fan, obviously I went home disappointed. I nearly got more out of the warm-up than the game itself.
One thing I noticed was that each Barcelona player came out for the warm-up with a ball of his own whereas United all jogged out on to the pitch and went to collect the balls off one of the coaches who had been out before them. And when they were finished the warm-up, each Barcelona player headed back into the dressingroom with his own ball again.
It just struck me as something that didn’t happen by accident, that each of these Barcelona players have an in-built relationship with the ball.
It doesn’t just start when the referee blows the whistle.
Along with that, Barcelona’s attitude during the game was something to see. I kept an eye on Messi after he scored his goal and the very first thing he did was chase down Patrice Evra straight from the restart.
He had just scored a brilliant goal and could have basked in a bit of glory for himself but instead he was tearing after Evra and making him hurry his pass. Barcelona work hard and honestly for each other – it’s the first thing they get right and it allows everything else to flow from it. The exact same principles apply to our own game at home. The best teams work like dogs for each other.
You’ll see that over this coming weekend when all the main contenders for the All-Ireland are playing.
As I see it, there’s a big three – Cork, Kerry and Dublin – with a possibility of developing into a big four when Tyrone finally show their hand. And each of those teams go out to work for each other from the word go.
In an odd kind of way, it could almost be Dublin’s downfall. I don’t accept this notion that losing the league final was a major disaster for them because they are going to be there or thereabouts when we get into August. They’re too good not to be and they have a work ethic that will carry them past most teams.
They remind me a bit of Barcelona in the way they’re all so selfless when it comes to their workrate. But I would be worried for them that they almost overdo it. They lost the league final because they didn’t finish the game with their best 15 on the field, a direct result of them going hell for leather and emptying themselves out.
Dublin have some great players but if they’re not on the pitch when the game is in the melting pot with 10 minutes to go, they’re not a lot of use to them. Bryan Cullen is an exceptional player, one of the finest kick-passers in the game and a man with a great sense of which option to choose under pressure.
But if he’s sitting in the stand because he’s busted himself for 55 minutes and Pat Gilroy has sent on someone who is fresher but maybe not as canny, then Dublin will lose out eventually.
It isn’t that the subs coming in aren’t any good, it’s more that they’re just not as competent on the ball.
When a game is finely-balanced like that, competence and presence of mind on the ball is the key to winning. But if Dublin players are empty by the time it gets to that stage, then it will catch up with them.
Closing out a game is something you learn as you go on but the fundamental thing you need is to have your best team on the pitch for those final 10 minutes. Dublin are in danger of being totally flahed out when they get to that point.
It seems odd to say it but you can take work rate too far. I’ve always said that one of Dublin’s two or three most important players is Stephen Cluxton, purely because there is nobody in the game who can kick the ball out like him.
I spent my whole career as a midfielder relying on goalkeepers to kick the ball out to me but Cluxton reverses those roles completely. He’s so good with his kick-outs that Dublin are nearly letting him down if they don’t make something of them. That’s unique in my experience of the game.
Because he’s such a beautiful ball-striker, he can ping those kick-out straight as a bullet into a fella’s chest 40 or 50 yards away all day long. So Dublin run plays from their kick-outs to use him to their advantage. If you’re in Croke Park this Sunday, watch them as he puts the ball down. Three or four different outfield players will make three or four different runs as decoys and Cluxton will look up and invariably he’ll hit the free one.
But while it’s extremely effective and it keeps possession most of the time, you’d have to wonder what sort of physical toll it all takes. If you’ve got four lads making dummy runs for each kick-out and then you have the same again making overlapping runs to support the man in possession, that’s an awful lot of energy expended before you’ve got the ball up as far as midfield.
Whereas if you’ve got the option of having a man in midfield who the goalkeeper can kick the ball out 60 yards to and you’re reasonably confident that he’ll win, say, 70 per cent of ball out there, you should use it.
Okay, your possession statistics will go down but come those last 10 minutes of a tight game, the lads who were spared all those dummy runs will be a lot fresher and will think a lot clearer.
I’m not saying that this kick-out strategy is what will keep them from winning the All-Ireland but it’s just one small example and it all ties in to the same issue. Dublin have this game plan that depends so much on each player emptying himself and giving everything. It’s really admirable to watch and, as I say, it will be good enough to beat most teams. I wouldn’t be so sure that it will be enough to beat Cork and Kerry though.
They should win Leinster if they want it enough. I know people say that provincial titles don’t mean anything anymore and maybe some supporters look at it that way. But players want to win things and six Leinster medals are better than five Leinster medals in any man’s language.
We always went out to win the Munster title each year and then set our sights on the All-Ireland when it was over. They’re two different competitions and they ask different questions of you. In our case – although not in Dublin’s obviously – there was always a change of venue involved.
The older I got, the more I enjoyed playing in Killarney where the grass would be left a bit longer and the ball would hold up a little more. Páirc Uí Chaoimh was a small bit different because it’s a hurling pitch and grass would be cut shorter.
So if it was a wet day and the ball was skidding around the place, the game would go at 100 miles an hour and a slow lad like me wouldn’t enjoy it as much.
But since I had so much experience of playing there, I was fine. Gradually, I got comfortable in Croke Park too but the same goes for it as well. Short grass, fast pitch, wide open spaces. They’re small things to consider but I think subconsciously they let you know that you’re in a different competition now.
You automatically lift yourself another few per cent. Dublin don’t have to leave Croke Park to win Leinster but each game will bring little things that are different. Bigger crowds, more press, whatever.
I can see them beating Laois on Sunday, although Laois will see Dublin as a team they can have a go at. Despite only doing just enough to get past Longford the last day, I think the analysis of that match has been overly negative and Laois are better than people are giving them credit for.
They played into a gale in the second half of that match and came through it to win against a team that was on a high after a great league campaign.
But to hear some people talk about it afterwards, you’d think they had no chance.
This happens the whole time now and a lot of it is down to the fact that The Sunday Game deals more with negatives than with positives after a match.
I was in Portlaoise that day but when I got home and watched The Sunday Game that night, it felt like we were talking about different matches altogether.
I nearly started doubting myself because listening to the boys on the panel analyse the games, they sounded like shocking bad matches.
And they weren’t.
Now they weren’t epics by any means but they weren’t stinkers either.
There’s so much negativity in the country with things the way they are in the economy that I just don’t see the point of always being negative about our games. Being an auctioneer, I was at a talk on the economy a while back at the Guinness Hopstore.
Since it was about whether house prices would stop falling anytime soon, this was an appropriate place to have it. We’d have no trouble finding sorrows to drown, that’s for sure!
But I found it interesting that one of the speakers was an economist and he told a story about how RTÉ had contacted him about going on one of their programmes to talk about the economy recently.
He said he’d be happy to come on; that he had plenty of positive things to say because everybody knew what the negatives were at this stage. And they got back to him to let him know that they were going with someone else instead because they were more interested in covering the negative side of it that night.
Whatever about the economy, I don’t think that’s how we should be covering our games. But to watch The Sunday Game sometimes, you’d think it was Prime Time you had switched on.
The incidents they pick out for their highlights won’t always be the ones that affected the way the game went. They’ll show the important scores obviously but if it’s a choice between a couple of great catches by a midfielder early on that set the tempo of the game or a corner-forward getting sent off with five minutes to go when the result is beyond all doubt, you can be sure they’ll show the sending-off.
Why such a focus on the negatives? These are great games that people love. I enjoy watching Colm O’Rourke and Joe Brolly analyse a game because they tell it like it is, whether it’s positive or negative.
But there’s such a focus on every little rule that has been broken and on highlighting every little incident that might cause a bit of controversy.
The more it goes on, the more I think we’re in danger of missing out on the things that make the games enjoyable.
