Why Dubs are far from greatest
DON’T MISS LIAM HAYES BRILLIANT GAELIC FOOTBALL COLUMN
GENERALLY speaking, my relationship with Dublin football supporters is surprisingly good, and has been despite the tiny blip on the afternoon that three of my neighbours in my housing estate on the west side of the city decided to do a jig (mixed in with a bit of a Highland Fling, I was informed) on my tiny patch of front lawn. It was the late afternoon of the 1991 All-Ireland football final.
I was captain of the Meath team that lost that afternoon to Down by two points. We were 11 points behind at one stage in the second half, but staged a serious fightback that ended up two points short. Minutes after the final whistle, my neighbours decided to dance on my football grave.
I know this because my neighbours didn’t know that my motherin-law and father-in-law were babysitting our two infant children that same afternoon, and watched the Riverdance rehearsal through the window of our front room. Time has passed. I’ve now lived in Dublin for 29 years, and every second month I am roundly abused by a car-load of gurriers who spot me on my daily jog, which has slowed to a trot over the last decade. Jog or trot, they lower a window and let me know what is on their minds, oblivious to the fact that they are travelling at 40 or 50 miles per hour and I am travelling at two miles per hour and can never hear one word of their foul discouragement.
I’ve no idea whether this form of inspection by car-loads of Dubs has anything to do with my honest views on their county team — the fact that in the last month I have appeared to infuriate a great many Dublin football supporters with my assertions that Diarmuid Connolly has dishonoured the Dublin jersey and that Jim Gavin’s efforts to ringfence Connolly’s ‘good name’ as a Dublin footballer is no longer comical, and is fairly and squarely embarrassing for everyone who cares about the good name of the Dublin football team.
Connolly and Gavin are now conjoined in failing to understand that Dublin’s magnificent blue jersey should be held up to the highest of standards.
Unlike most of my Dublin neighbours, my brain is not rinsed fortnightly in different shades of blue. I watch my local team (Dublin!) as a critic and an admirer. In fact I have not watched the team I played for in a 12 year career (Meath) in over 16 years — last time I saw Meath in the flesh was the afternoon of the 2001 All-Ireland football final.
I’m not counting down the days and years to Meath’s next Leinster or All-Ireland title, same as Pat Spillane does not wake up every morning of the week and first thing think of how he can put his shoulder to the wheel of the Kerry footballers. Gavin’s assertion that Spillane was doing so in his condemnation of Connolly made the Dublin manager sound infantile.
Gavin, frankly, is someone who needs to be taken by the collar, held up higher than his five feet and five inches, and seriously inspected as to his true worth as a leader of men.
We have to live with his self-righteousness, and nauseating smugness, but we don’t have to buy into and further bulge the definite impression that he is a manager of superior worth. He is managing a damn good Dublin team at a period of time with Gaelic football is idling.
There’s not a soul in Leinster to put up even half a fight. Kerry have been in one of their occasional slumps and are rebuilding fast. Donegal, the best that Ulster has to offer, have been teetering on the edge of mediocrity since 2014. And Mayo, whom Dublin have beaten by a nose on a couple of occasions these last few years, are… well, Mayo’s toughest opponent this decade has been the mentally fragile, if not porous, Mayo football team.
Probably the clearest and most defining judgment on a Dublin team which is now unanimously received as the greatest football team of the modern era, and is held up as rivaling any team of any generation, is offered to us all by how they have performed against Tyrone.
Tyrone, for exactly 10 years, have been the game’s most impressive also rans, but in their last five meetings (four of them in Croke Park) Dubin have beaten Tyrone by one point, one point again, one point a third time, drawn, and drawn a second time. A Tyrone team still hugely dependent on their noughties hero Sean Cavanagh has shown Dublin to be a team nowhere near the title of the greatest team of all time.
TOMORROW, if they defeat Kildare (and they will do so by between 10 and 20 points) Gavin’s men will bring home a seventh Leinster title in succession and thereby equal the record of Kevin Heffernan’s Dubs from the mid 70s. Of course the two ‘sevens’ are in entirely different ball parks.
Heffo had an Offaly team which was the greatest Offaly team of all time, and a Meath team that was the second greatest Meath team of all time (marginally behind Sean Boylan’s 1980s Meath), to overcome each of those seven summers. Gavin, in comparison, has had no other team to meet in Leinster that can be taken at all seriously.
Gavin needs to be seriously inspected as to his true worth as a leader
Most Dublin supporters below 40 years of age have no idea what I am talking about — and they will refuse to take my word for it that Leinster in the ’70s was Jurassic Park, Leinster in the ’80s was Jurassic Park with some manners, that Leinster in the 90s was an average complicated jungle in which you had to have your wits about you, and that Leinster in the noughties was a place where nobody was any longer in harm’s way.
Leinster these last seven years? It’s a playpen.
It is the most worthless and uncompetitive provincial championship I have ever endured during my lifetime as a footballer supporter — a lifetime that touches upon half a century of turning up in Croke Park.
Every other county in Leinster should feel ashamed of themselves for allowing this to be the case.
Dublin, as the rulers of the same province, know in their hearts that Leinster is no kingdom. And all of the Leinster medals held by this team would be worthless if pawned any morning this week.
I admire the Dublin football team. I have bowed to them, and burst myself to compete against them (and finally beat them down in the Championship five years out of six) in my younger lifetime.
I watch Dublin more than any other team, enjoy them, and regularly in recent years under the guidance of Gavin I have been equally intoxicated and intrigued by their fearlessness in tearing apart all of the defensive-minded and scared-stiff teams that have stood in their way.
Dublin are magnificent, but only so in the prism of a modern version of Gaelic football that is impossible to put shoulder-to-shoulder with all that came before it.
I am thankful for them. I am also happy to etch Dublin’s name in either wood or silver as the greatest team we have ever seen… in the last five or six years. Beyond that? Not even one inch.
‘Whether it is a club game in the top of Mayo or I am walking down the street, if some kid wants a picture I will do what I would have wanted to happen as a 10-year-old’ AIDAN O’SHEA’S DETERMINED STANCE ON SELFIES