Tyrone must work to ensure Dubs earn title
TYRONE’S worthiness as All-Ireland finalists looks the only impediment on Dublin’s vast horizon. Can Mickey Harte’s crew make a game of it?
It is important that they do because tomorrow sees more than an All-Ireland final or just another random red letter-day in the jampacked history of the GAA.
We make only one significant demand of Dublin’s opponents.
Tyrone must do everything they can to ensure that everyone who witnesses this particular All-Ireland final can see that Dublin are indeed heir to Kerry’s title as the Greatest Football Team of all Time.
All we earnestly ask of Tyrone is that they neither flop, nor wilt.
It seems not too much to ask. But Dublin’s fullest powers have not been unleashed at all in the last 12 months. Jim Gavin’s men have not been sleep-walking. More like watching and waiting all through the summer. Measuring the opposition. And winning based on necessity more than sheer indulgence.
In this same manner, Dublin will win their fourth All-Ireland title in succession. We’re all pretty sure of that. We don’t expect anything more from Tyrone.
Though we idly wonder about their manager, the indefatigable and unmovable Mickey Harte, and we are all equally guilty of looking at him as though he was a fifth founder of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and that the name Harte sits as upright and esteemed as Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw and Slytherin.
We’re not putting the man down. We’re only making it quite clear that as a prized team boss, Harte passed from fact into fiction quite some time ago.
DUBLIN may have to call upon their greatness all on their own tomorrow. It’s unlikely they will receive manful help for anything like 70 minutes.
We do wish for them to be great on this occasion. A fourth All-Ireland title, each sitting on top of the other, earnestly makes a request that it be especially memorable, but of course, we cannot forget that Kerry beat Dublin by 17 points and 10 points in the 1978 and 79 finals, dropped their guard and won by three points in a slugfest against Roscommon for their third in 1980, and that the magnificent fourth 12 months later was a meandering seven-point victory over Offaly that nobody has been bothered talking about ever since.
Kerry’s historic fourth had a blanket thrown over its head because of the sneaky and brilliant theft of their fifth title the following year.
Dubin’s historic fourth might also be forgettable, and if it is then we will hardly complain for too long because the finals of 2016 and 17, and both one-point victories, stand together as the greatest and
longest All-Ireland contest of all time... at 210 thrilling minutes and some.
But Dublin at their furious best would be good. It’s also needed at the very end of a Championship that spilled an awful lot more than it thrilled. And if any one of us was a fly on the wall in the Dublin dressing room as Jim Gavin addresses his men one last time, we would hope to be privvy to words sumthe moning a gigantic performance.
We want it all from this Dublin team. Gavin’s men make us greedy. They are a team that not only sits on top of an untidy heap, they actually help us to make sense of the game we love. And they remind us with pretty much every single performance that football’s slow and painful evolution — changing from a game that was reckless and risked nearly everything in its use of possession, to a game far more mindful of the importance of simply holding onto the ball — is not the worst thing that has ever happened in the story of Gaelic football.
Dublin look to blot out daylight in their own half of the field as quickly as every other team. But once in possession there is no team like Dublin. Their bravery and courage, and total self-belief, once they have ball is vastly superior to every one else. And the recurring brilliance with which they can cut open every other team is in the same league as poetry in motion.
Whatever we see in the game tomorrow, whether Dublin settle in a slightly disappointing fourth gear or not, we still know we’re going to enjoy something more as a special treat. Because, unlike every other team, Dublin are not stingy when it comes to handing out individual treats.
We know we’re going to get James McCarthy’s powerful cut-throat running through blocks of opponents, Jack McCaffrey’s savagery in eating up the cleanest yards, Ciarán Kilkenny’s happiness to work and work, and Brian Fenton, who personally amazes me more than any other Dublin footballer.
Fenton is the midfielder who never sleeps.
He adorns the modern game, and while Dublin will only get to share the throne with Mick O’Dwyer’s Kerry when they win tomorrow, Fenton has already in a ridiculously short space of time proven himself the greatest midfielder I have ever seen. I say that as someone who had the honour of seeing Jack O’Shea up close and playing against him four times, each occasion a mystery and a forlorn honour.
Fenton is already a little bit better than Jacko, I think, and I’m sure he’s going to get a whole better than the man who once was the single greatest footballer of all time.
We wish to see the very best of him and Dublin, and all we ask from Tyrone is just enough help to get them both there.