Dubs are no angels and Jim knows it
SORRY to break it to you, Jim, but unless the referees taking charge of Dublin matches this summer have spent the past four years cryogenically frozen, they know your team is cynical.
They will know, too, that Kerry, Donegal, Mayo, Monaghan and the rest of the counties clamouring after your champions are cynical. It is no secret.
Gavin seemed to offer a passable impression of a manager shocked by the claim his team are cynics when it was put to him at the launch of the Leinster Championship.
Perhaps when he recovers, someone might introduce him to the second half of the 2013 final, when his team did everything permissible and a great deal impermissible when sealing off the first AllIreland win under him.
Mayo players were dragged down by a Dublin team defending its line with the aplomb of rugby league men.
We’ve known a long time that Dublin are cynical, just as we know Kerry can mind themselves when the game strays down half-lit side-streets.
The best teams all do it and, brace yourselves, hurling sides do it, too.
No manager can be expected to own up to this, but Gavin might stop being so earnest about Dublin’s commitment to purity. Like motherhood and apple pie, it’s something everyone is in favour of, in theory.
In practice, business gets done any which way.