IF THE HALO FITS?

Jim Gavin sees his Dublin side as puritans of the game but isolated cases of brutality just can’t be ignored

Behind Dublin’s brilliance, their hard-nosed pragmatism cannot be washed away

THIS week you might have been codded into thinking that the Dublin/Kerry 2013 All-Ireland semi-final was just a game of jaw-dropping beauty, but that’s not how everyone saw it.

It was one embellished by Colm Cooper’s brilliance in the first half, and that famous two-step back delayed pass to Donncadh Walsh has been referenced time and again as tributes gushed in honour of a genius.

However, another Gooch play in the second half would have a far greater influence on the outcome of that match.

In the 56th minute, he broke cover with ball and raced through before he was scythed down with a deliberate trip by his namesake Johnny Cooper.

The Dublin defender was already on a yellow card and should have picked up another one – which the foul warranted – but Dublin saw the game out to win with 15 men.

If you can’t remember that play at this remove, don’t go beating yourself up. Others had forgotten in far less time.

When RTÉ returned to their studio panel that afternoon, Joe Brolly claimed the result rather than the game as a victory for football.

‘I am delighted Dublin won, Kerry were cynical,’ suggested the pundit.

No doubt, over the course of 70-plus minutes of breathless ball there would be some evidence to back that up.

But it wasn’t Kerry who came close to losing a man to a sending off for a deliberate foul – the kind that would be legislated for within 12 months by the introduction of a black card. Or, for that matter, it wasn’t Kerry who were left sweating over a photograph for 24 hours afterwards which revealed a prostate Gooch with a Dublin player’s finger clawing at his eye area.

In the end, the latter was put to bed because still photographs are not admissible in the GAA’s disciplinary process – understandable given their poverty of context – but that does not mean the image evaporates from the mind.

Perhaps, it was still in the back of Éamonn Fitzmaurice’s mind this week when he chose to embrace rather than shirk a question regarding the narrative which has seen his team painted as the beast to Jim Gavin’s beauty, in what has become a hopelessly one-sided affair in more ways than one.

No doubt, there are some who will find the whataboutery nature of Fitzmaurice’s comments this week distasteful, but it needed airing.

And not because of his claim that there is an echo of the alleged ‘orchestrated’ media campaign which so enraged Mayo last September when they felt that Lee Keegan was tried in public before the All-Ireland final replay and convicted under black card law .

We find that a hard one to buy. The reality in the media vacuum is that former players often fill the space that might otherwise be occupied by the central cast figures who are gagged these days.

We find it hard to believe that any team management is out there actively seeking to coach such a large constituency for propaganda purposes.

But what really grates with Fitzmaurice is the perception – cultivated in part – and rarely challenged by Gavin that his team are guardians of the game’s true values.

‘We played our traditional style of football and got the draw in the end,’ declared Gavin in the aftermath of the recent League game in Tralee, where both teams got down and dirty.

It was the second game in a row against Kerry that Dublin finished with 14 men; Cormac Costello’s back card in last year’s semi-final and Ciarán Kilkenny’s double yellow taken last month at the death in a bid to kill Kerry counter-attacks.

Yet, in the fall-out it was Kerry who took most of the heat – perhaps rightly because they took the bulk of the yellow cards – but the notion that today’s League final can be sold as a clash between the game’s puritans and its lost tribe is fantasy, but it is one which some commentators like Brolly will happily buy

into.

Because behind Dublin’s brilliance, there is not just hard-nosed pragmatism at play but there have also been acts of isolated brutality which cannot be so easily washed away.

Under Gavin’s watch they have had two players charged with biting offences, another take a one-match suspension for an attempted eye-gouge.

They also incurred the GAA’s wrath for refusing to co-operate with an investigation into a brawl before a challenge match which left one of their number needing hospital treatment.

And they too, when needed, have shown a capacity to commit the ordinary decent foul that is now accepted as part of a game so poisoned by spite we no longer even know where the boundaries are anymore.

We have become so desensitised by the game’s fouling culture that it now qualifies as conventional wisdom to deem cynicism an acceptable part of a team’s make-up.

In fact, it now passes for a backhanded compliment.

All Fitzmaurice pointed out this week is that when that compliment is being paid; the champions should not be forgotten.

They have earned that right as much as the next team.