Hope and ambition survive in football
Hurling might have taken the headlines this year but today’s final will pack Croker despite the negativity
WE made it. Despite all, we’ve got to Sunday, September 2. Yes children, there will be an All-Ireland football final this year. It looked in doubt there for a while.
This, remember, has been a Championship of the agonies. Successive Saturdays and Sundays brought fresh indignities for those with a predisposition towards the old game. There were too many hand-passes, too few long kickouts, not enough scores, a surfeit of cynicism, an absence of imagination, a reliance on tactical suffocation. And as football struggled, hurling soared. Long-dead Greek poets cursed mortality and the clay that held them; if only they could have lived through the new Championship format of the small-ball game, imagine the epics they would have been moved to write.
Football was ugly in comparison, matches collapsing into one shapeless mess. Legend has it that a round-two qualifier is still being played somewhere in the midlands, the two teams locked in tactical paralysis and the fixture long since forgotten about by everyone else.
Yet out of the formless misery of the football Championship emerges this day.
In spite of all the despair, 82,000 people will pack Croke Park this afternoon.
Long before midday, Drumcondra and the other villages in the vicinity of the ground will be stuffed with red and white jerseys. Tyrone fans will travel early and in big numbers, and eventually they will be joined by the colours of the champions.
Somehow, hope and ambition and excitement have survived the football campaign. Well, of course they have. There was never any doubt about that, because much of the angst expressed about football is nonsense.
It was not an especially energising Championship, that’s true, and it is difficult to see any circumstances in which Tyrone can win the All-Ireland this afternoon. The sense of certainty surrounding Dublin’s defence of their title strengthened on the Saturday evening in June that Mayo were tipped out of the Championship.
When Kerry’s weaknesses were exposed in the Super Eights, repeatedly and without mercy, another presumed source of resistance to Dublin was removed.
Kerry were nothing near the power they shaped to be in Munster, while Mayo’s weariness in the qualifiers gave no convincing indication they could challenge Dublin as they did in 2016 and 2017.
However, stories worth savouring emerged through the deadening sense of inevitability.
The moxie of Monaghan and the courage of Kildare were two of them. There is a young squad forming in Donegal with talents persuasive enough to encourage optimism among their followers. And there are the finalists, too. Tyrone, frankly, do not look to have changed enough from the side Dublin tore apart last year, to support ambitions of an upset today. But they are back in a final nonetheless, their first in a decade. Their inscrutable, immovable manager is perhaps their best hope, and Mickey Harte will savour the possibility of beating Dublin and upending conventional thinking to win a fourth All-Ireland.
That, though, looks a slim prospect. Dublin are marvellous, a team on the lip of enduring glory.
That they are so close to four in a row, and the attendant historical repercussions, and yet relatively unheralded, has a few causes.
One is the inevitable reluctance of rivals to cheer serial winners.
Another is the facelessness of the Dublin group: the names are well known but the environment around the side is so sterile and so controlled that very little in the way of individual personality emerges.
And another reason is the ease of their transit through the Championship. Dublin haven’t been seriously challenged in 12 months. Their critics choose to attribute this to the enormous commercial power behind the side. But that ignores the failings of their rivals and, more importantly, it deliberately avoids the issue of how well coached Dublin are.
Big sponsorship deals don’t make Jim Gavin or Jason Sherlock excellent trainers. And it is the quality of their work with the players that has made Dublin seem untouchable.
This is a disciplined, well-drilled side, tailored to eschew high-risk football and instead prioritise patience and accuracy.
It is remarkable to have to say it about a team one game away from unimpeachable greatness, but Dublin are an extraordinary side.
That isn’t down to commerce, but talent and training.
The fear, spoken about all week, is that they turn this match into an extended warm-down long before the end. There is undoubtedly a chance that could happen, but that in itself will be a manifestation of their greatness, as Kilkenny’s mauling of Waterford in the 2008 hurling final was.
And if the game takes a more unexpected turn, then Harte will have stumped us all again.