Star Mannion’s blue steel can galvanise Dubs
DUBLIN are so good, so well resourced, and so envied that they feel like a team apart. The history and sense of community that other counties represent aren’t often cited as parts of the blue wave.
The emergence of the great Kevin Heffernan team of the 1970s is credited with saving Gaelic games in the city.
Their All-Ireland semi-final win over defending champions Cork in 1974, for instance, was not covered by RTÉ, as the resources of the national broadcaster were instead directed towards the final day of the Horse Show in the RDS.
Dublin football did not make news back then.
That all changed under Heffernan, and after him, even their bad times made headlines.
He helped to revive and enliven Gaelic games in the metropolis, but from then on Dublin were viewed not as another GAA settlement, but as a more mechanised, urbanised version of the culture.
Yet the passing of one of the great players of the Heffernan era was a powerful reminder of
the history and community that permeates Dublin football as much as any other GAA culture on the island.
The funeral of Anton O’Toole saw the current Dublin football squad in attendance, with some of their number carrying the coffin of one of the most popular men to ever represent the county. It was a poignant insight into the bonds that tie past and present in Dublin, as they do in every other county.
A city with over a million people in it might feel cold and impersonal compared to rural counties where the GAA population is more tightly bound, but this week illustrated that the feeling of kinship wrought by Gaelic games is as powerful in the capital as elsewhere.
And Dublin football folk will feel their guts tighten this week. The prospect of facing Louth, or any other opponent in the Leinster Championship, is not one that has concerned the county for many years, but Saturday night nonetheless marks the start of a Championship that promises to end in unprecedented joy for Dublin football.
A week that started with a farewell to the darling of one generation will end with this one taking their first steps towards unarguable greatness.
And, even allowing for the inevitability of the match’s outcome, the occasion is causing excitement. Supporters want to be there for every feature of a season that could complete the five-in-a-row.
Louth will not put up significant resistance but, after a jumpy League campaign, Jim Gavin will want his champions to rediscover the ruthless certainty that has powered the past half-decade of success.
And the man who will cause Louth — and every other opponent — more trouble than most will be Paul Mannion.
He turns 26 on Saturday, the day of the game, and the past two campaigns have not only established him in the Dublin forward line; they have seen him emerge as the successor to Bernard Brogan as the arrowhead of the attack.
His emergence in 2013, only out of his teens, was as an inside forward. His return to the side featured additional duties as a scavenging wing forward. Last year showed he can do it all.
Mannion has terrific pace but is also an unerring finisher. Marc Ó Sé put Mannion’s threat thus in these pages recently: ‘If I was still playing, Mannion is the forward I would fear the most. When he gets possession, he goes straight for you in the knowledge he has the legs and the finishing power to make it count.
‘I don’t think it is in the power of one defender to stop him. He needs to be screened with pressure put on the ball coming through,’ added Ó Sé.
Mannion finished last year an All Star, as he did 2017. And that was the campaign that signalled his arrival. After that scorching start to his intercounty career in 2013, concluding with his first All-Ireland, he was hobbled by injury and then spent an academic year in Beijing. He returned to Ireland in the summer of 2015, and travelled to the US to play football in Chicago.
It was 2016 when he rejoined Gavin’s panel, but he could get no firm purchase on a starting place. But by the start of the 2017 championship, he was fit and ready to roar.
The timing of Mannion’s bloom has been ideal for his manager, too. The great forward line that inspired the wins of 2013, 2015 and 2016 has been disrupted by departures, injuries and age. Brogan and Kevin McManamon are marginal forces now.
Paul Flynn has retired and Diarmuid Connolly remains a tantalising figure in the past.
Mannion, Ciarán Kilkenny and Dean Rock are the leaders of the best forward line in the country now. Kilkenny provides the labour and sets the tempo, Rock the free-taking accuracy.
Mannion brings a mercurial threat to opponents, as described by Ó Sé. He was fouled for and scored the penalty that brought Tyrone’s early momentum to a deadening halt in last year’s final.
His actions were those of a leader, inspiring his team after the opposition’s quick start saw Tyrone lead 0-5 to 0-1.
And those counties with serious designs on stopping Dublin this year will have curtailing Mannion as their first job.
In a recent interview he talked about his fears over climate change, displaying a level of social engagement — and a willingness to talk about their thoughts beyond sport — that is rare among GAA players now.
‘That’s what alarms me most,’ said Mannion.
‘It literally keeps me up at night. It’s something everybody should be concerned about. We need to do something about it now. Right now.’
It only confirms the impression of a smart, engaged man with a hinterland beyond Dublin football. But it is Dublin football that has made him renowned, that will see him cast as one of the boys of a summer that promises to shine more brilliantly blue than any before.
And Mannion is a fitting inheritor of a rich and honourable tradition.
‘Mannion’s the forward I’d fear the most’