When the end justifies the means

Paul Brennan says Dr Crokes ability and humility to close out the All-Ireland Club final in the fashion they did was totally justified as they claimed the title

FOR all the eulogising about this Dr Crokes team over the last few years - from their individual brilliance to their collective bouncebackability, from their beautiful passing and possession game to their ruthlessness when they sense weakness - their pragmatism is often overlooked. Perhaps it that recent trio of All-Ireland semi-final losses or those of couple of more recent barren seasons on the domestic stage or all that way back to the heartache of the 2007 All-Ireland Final defeat that made them so, but last Friday it was pragmatism, pure and simple, that got Dr Crokes over the winning line.

That’s what make champions, and that’s what makes great champions - that ability and humility to adapt and become what you need to become to get it done.

This Dr Crokes team and panel is teeming with some of the best football talent in the country, never mind Kerry. We’d suggest that Crokes are some way ahead of Slaughtneil in terms of raw football talent. Probably ahead of Corofin, too, man for man. Dublin champions St Vincents have some serious individual talent through their team, but would any of that trio of clubs leave Micheal Burns, Tony Brosnan or Jordan Kiely on the substitutes bench game after game and feel they were starting their best fifteen? We doubt it.

Yet for all that talent, for all that capacity to go out and back oneself to out-play and out-score the opposition, there are days when a football team - even great football teams - have to be pragmatic. Last Friday Dr Crokes were that team.

Going back out for the second half against the 14 men of Slaughtneil it would have been easy, perhaps, for the Dr Crokes management to instruct their team to simply take the game to the opposition. It’s Croke Park, it’s a vast pitch. You’ve the pace of Gavin White and Johnny Buckley and Daithí Casey down the middle. You’ve Burns, Kiely and Tony Brosnan to spring from the bench when - as they surely would - Slaughtneil legs begin to tire. Go hard. Go for the jugular. Go for it.

But the Derry and Ulster champions weren’t there just to punch

their card at the start of the second half, mark time and go home a beaten docket because they were down to 14 players. And the Dr Crokes management and players would have known that. The numerically disadvantaged team don’t always lose, y’know.

So Dr Crokes got pragmatic. Their manager Pat O’Shea is a basketball man as much as a football man and so Dr Crokes last Friday concocted the perfect mix of man-to-man and zone defence. Stay with your opponent but drop back also. Invite Slaughtneil close, but not too close, and hit them on the counter-attack but don’t over-commit bodies to it.

In the 39th minute Brian Looney stole inside the Slaughtneil defence and drew a foul. Casey converted. In the 46th minute Looney slipped a simple pass to Burns ahead of him and the substitute laser his shot over the bar. Five minutes later Kiely won a free similar to Looney’s earlier one and Colm Cooper obliged from the free kick.

In boxing parlance it was jabjab-and-retreat. Slaughtneil were cut above the eye, out on their feet but still in the fight and dangerous. They needed to land a sucker-punch. Dr Crokes didn’t need to engage. They needed to dance and move and that’s exactly what they did. They had the armoury to pound Slaughtneil but on a difficult evening weather-wise the chose to play the percentages. The chose to use the extra man and space to retain the ball, to recycle the ball, to make Slaughtneil chase and chase.

It wasn’t the most edifying final ten minutes to an All-Ireland Final and was fairly atypical of how this Dr Crokes team usually plays but it is was understandable. A decade ago they were denied by Crossmaglen Rangers and Oisin McConville’s controversial equalising point. In the 2012 semi-final they were naive in their second half collapse to the same opposition. A year later they possibly took Ballymun Kickhams for granted a little in Thurles. In 2014 Cooper’s cruciate injury conspired against them in another semi-final defeat, this time to Castlebar Mitchels. Bad luck, bad choices, bad days. Whatever else, Dr Crokes were going to play last Friday’s final on their terms as much as they could. There’s no doubt Padraig Cassidy’s red card and dismissal turned the game irrevocably away from Slaughtneil. It was going to take a miracle for them to outscore Dr Crokes - above any team - by two points in that second half to win the game. But Dr Crokes still had to go out and play the game, and engage Slaughtneil and get it done.

When the highlights of their Kerry and Munster and All-Ireland campaigns are edited and spliced together for the commemorative DVD everything from the 51st minute of the All-Ireland final could be left on the cutting-room floor. Or perhaps not. Maybe that last 13 minutes should be put on a second DVD - in a deluxe edition - and titled ‘How The End Justifies The Means: the art of pragmatism.’

Championships and finals are there to be won. When you do that the means are always justified.

For all the eulogising about this Dr Crokes team over the last few years their pragmatism is often overlooked