Travelling Dubs face new set of questions

The Dub is a homely creature and travels to the country only on those rare occasions when it is unavoidable. Thus it was inevitable that Saturday in Thurles would be enlivened by tales of Dubs who had turned back for home disheartened by traffic at places like Monasterevin, Kildare or Athy. RT╔ might as well hand their phone-in programmes over to the AA Roadwatch people today, because great and unassuagable will be the grief of the Dub who left his burrow sometime after 10.0, picked up his mates, drove around looking for the right motorway and then found it choked with other Dubs.

The unhappiness of the Dub will be heightened by the knowledge that he missed an extraordinary day out. The current generation of Dublin footballers might have grown up on Saturday. We'll know soon enough.

As for Kerry? No better men for the thinking, and they have plenty of it to do. Start at the top.

For all his excellence and dash as a footballer, it's hard not to suspect that Kerry are beginning to pay the price for deploying Seamus Moynihan at full back. A couple of times in the course of every game you watch him play there you see Moynihan mentally checking himself when he comes out with the ball. Then he delivers it to some lesser mortal.

The damage he can do is limited. Then there is his work as a full back. He's such a pure footballer that his sense of unease at full back is usually disguised. Yet think back to the first 15 minutes of the second half of Kerry's first game against Armagh last year. It looked like Kerry would pay a price. This year against Cork, Colin Corkery had worked things out for himself. On Saturday, Dublin's goals were as opportunistic as the Taoiseach's visit to the dressing-room area afterwards, but the scores which Dessie Farrell and Colin Moran missed in the first half were the sort that would have had one wondering about the full back's whereabouts had they gone in.

It's a small problem for Kerry, where best to play the best footballer in the country, but they have to deal with Dublin's smart shackling of Russell and Crowley. Enough for one week.

Dublin have more serious considerations. Ian Robertson and Colin Moran, their two most injury prone forwards, are fit but out of form. Two cerebral, creative forwards are something which Dublin can't afford to discard lightly. Can form be relocated in the space of seven days? Maybe. But pace can't.

That's the Rubik's cube which Tom Carr has this week. Declan Darcy and Enda Sheehy bring many virtues. They can win their own ball. Sheehy has heft. Darcy has experience and free-taking flair. Neither burns the grass with pace, however. And no forward line can live without pace.

Wayne McCarthy and Senan Connell, bring different stuff to the party. They zip and buzz. They don't dig out much ball when times are thin, but they are the kind of footballers a team likes to set free with the last pass of a good move. They won't get caught and they'll clip their score.

Then there is the debate over the free-taking abilities of Darcy and McCarthy. Poor Wayne looked distracted by all the hugs and headrubs he was getting from his fellow players with a potentially match-winning kick awaiting him on Saturday. Even so, facing into a stiffish breeze it never looked as if he was going to have the range. Would Declan Darcy have popped it over?

That sense of curiosity regarding that last 45 was heightened by the experience of having watched Maurice Fitzgerald kick his sublime equalising point. In his twilight years Maurice has gilded his legend with a string of these sublime moments. Against Mayo in 1997, against Armagh for the draw last year, now Saturday.

The imminence of Maurice's retirement has probably been altered by his return to the splinterland of the bench. Even if the graceful burst of pace seems gone, his reputation can have received few more flattering endorsements than it did on Saturday when a couple of Dublin defenders attempted to assassinate him before he had touched a ball. It was a telling moment which the Kerrymen won't forget.

That's what sets next Saturday up so nicely. Kerry have the stronger hand but Dublin have the Big Mo, as American electoral strategists call that intangible that is momentum. Declan Quill, for instance, would be a star by now if he played in Dublin. Kerry have given him a couple of tastes of action this summer regardless of what he scores in challenges and training games. He sits on a bench with Maurice Fitzgerald and Denis O'Dwyer and other names, and on Saturday in the little spells when Kerry really played it was hard to see where any of them would fit in.

As for Dublin, they are a work in progress, but that business will have been hastened by Saturday. In the winter, on a manky day in Ballyshannon, Dublin took great encouragement from a gutsy display against Donegal and spent a lot of time afterwards wondering if they could lay their hands on that spirit if needed again. On Saturday it came upon them out of the blue.

That's what made it all so freaky. Monumental comebacks in football are usually the result of pressure building up until the damn bursts. On Saturday, though, Dublin twice trailed by eight points. The first time they got back to within four points and then slipped away again like drowning men disappearing under the foam.

With 12 minutes left and Kerry's eight-point lead restored, Dublin had seemingly zero momentum. Jason Sherlock - Dublin's best player in my book - was desperately trying to wind up the faithful. For their part, the faithful declined to be convinced until the Miracle of St Vincent reduced the gap to five and set Dublin on their way to scoring 2-3 without reply.

On Saturday in this paper Dessie Farrell said that Dublin needed to forget all the guff about answering their critics and answer the questions they had of themselves. In many ways they did that on Saturday. Next weekend brings a different set of tests and questions. The Dub with smart money will do two things: leave town earlier and hedge the bets.