Tipp ignore hullabaloo by naming Forde for final
DUBLIN LEGEND ALAN HAS ONE MORE BOX TO TICK
ALL-IRELAND champions Tipperary have named Jason Forde at midfield for tomorrow’s League final against Galway — despite a proposed two-match suspension hanging over him. The Silvermines player has been caught up in the hullabaloo over Davy Fitzgerald’s pitch incursion last Sunday but Tipperary are clearly gung-ho about getting him cleared after tangling with the Wexford manager. If Tipperary aren’t successful, Forde would miss out on the county’s Munster championship quarterfinal against Cork and a semi-final against Waterford if his team progress. With a broken thumb ruling out All-Star fullforward Seamus Callanan, Tipperary show two changes from the team that put 5-18 past Wexford, John ‘Bubbles’ O’Dwyer coming in at cornerforward and Michael Breen replacing Niall O’Meara at centreforward. Only Callanan and Darren Gleeson have League medals to their name in the Tipperary squad as the county goes in search of a first title since 2008. They are attempting to win the Division 1 title after taking the AllIreland title the previous year for the first time since 1965, the year they last completed back-toback All-Irelands. Division 1A side Galway, for their part, are looking for a first League title since 2010.
Dublin won’t mind losing the unbeaten record
PARNELL PARK last Thursday night offered a sharp illustration of the staggering strength of Dublin club football. Ballyboden St Endas, so impressive in capturing the All-Ireland title only 13 months ago, were dumped out of the senior championship and now must endure a pretty meaningless season.
The side that beat them? St Oliver Plunketts/Eoghan Ruadh, who fielded an attack that contained no less than three former Footballers of the Year. One of that trio, Alan Brogan, admitted that he has sympathy for Michael Darragh Macauley and the rest of the Ballyboden team.
Just 12 months earlier, Brogan was in the same place. Having settled into intercounty retirement, he had planned to empty himself for his club. But their season was effectively over by April after Castleknock beat them.
‘It is a crazy system and needs to change,’ Brogan says. ‘When you lose in it is a long, long time to wait until a championship game the following year. I know there is league football but it is all about championship.
‘There are a few things that need to be looked at...32 teams in the championship are too many, the Kilmacud result [Kilmacud Crokes scored 10-12 against Erin’s Isle] does nobody any good and there needs to be a round-robin group stage. It is in the Dublin hurling championship and the All-Ireland Football Championship will have it next year.’
Having lost three county finals in the past decade, winning a Dublin medal with his club is the last thing for Brogan left to achieve and those prospects have been boosted this year by the arrival of Paul Galvin, the 2009 Footballer of the Year.
‘He has been good to have around the place,’ says Brogan, who was at the Ideal Homes exhibition in the RDS yesterday. ‘He did well against Boden, he kicked a great point to put us one up. He was never one to shy away from a challenge and to come back at 37, to play Dublin club football is a massive challenge. But he has such a footballing brain that he could do a job anywhere.’
Only three weeks ago, Brogan and his wife welcomed their third addition, Hugo, to their family. Keeping an eye on his three boys will make the transition from county star a little easier although it has been strange being outside the Dublin camp, looking in.
Yet that is where he finds himself. He removed himself from the squad WhatsApp group on the day he announced his retirement and he doesn’t even ask Bernard anything about what is happenApril, ing within Jim Gavin’s squad.
‘You miss the camaraderie. You are with these guys five or six times a week, you become very tight. You are living out of each other’s pockets, constantly talking on the phone, discussing things. But once you leave the WhatsApp group, that’s it. You are gone. Obviously I am still very friendly with a lot of the lads, but they are doing their own thing with the Dublin team so I leave them at it.
‘I understand that they can’t talk about what is going on in the camp and I wouldn’t put them in that position by asking. I wouldn’t even ask Bernard. Sometimes, having the craic, I might ask him jokingly but he would shoot me a look as if to say: “are you for real!”
‘It is important what goes on in an inter-county team is kept within the confines of the team and management. That would be the rules I preached when I played. It is not going to be any different now.’
Few get to compose such a fairytale ending to their county career. Sprung from the bench by Gavin in the closing stages of the tense 2015 All-Ireland final, Brogan ended up kicking the final point.
‘The thing is that I only got on in the 64th minute. I would have liked to have been on for longer. People never remember that I was only on for a few minutes, just remember the score I got. I had actually come on for 20 or 25 minutes in the games leading up to the final. So I was looking at Jim, wondering “what’s the story here?” But he will tell me that he knew what he was doing.’
Even if Brogan claims that his direct line inside the camp is cut off, he knows enough about Gavin and his former team-mates to surmise that they won’t be losing any sleep over the League final defeat to Kerry. Indeed, it may be a good thing in the long run.
‘They won’t mind losing the unbeaten record,’ Brogan reckons. ‘When Jim sits back and thinks about it, he will be happy enough to lose a game, maybe not the League final in Croke Park against Kerry, but coming into the Championship, this whole unbeaten thing would have kept building and building in the media and while the players won’t talk about it, it would have been out there enough to get into their heads and create their own pressure.
‘So I think Jim will be happy enough that’s being knocked on the head. And the players will be smarting from a defeat to Kerry, too. There were a few cracks shown over the League so it will do the players no harm,’ Brogan says, drawing a parallel with the 2014 defeat to Donegal.
‘When a team keeps winning, it papers over cracks and it can take a loss for guys to realise that they need to take a cold, hard look at what they are doing. Jim has been in this position before, losing to Donegal in 2014. We felt that we were on a crest of a wave at that stage, we were flying and didn’t look at ourselves as closely as we should have until after that.
‘Dublin have won five or six on the bounce but Kerry were always going to beat them at some stage. There was no doubt about that, so Dublin are happier that it came in a League final rather than in an All-Ireland final.’
While there was three All-Ireland titles, and a Footballer of the Year award, in the tailend of Brogan’s career, it’s often forgotten that his early days with Dublin had plenty of big-day disappointments and close calls in the Leinster Championship.
Yesterday morning, someone emailed him a clip of the 2005 Leinster final, when Mossy Quinn kicked a last-gasp free to beat Laois. ‘I remember those days as fondly as the All-Ireland final wins,’ Brogan smiles.
Such is Dublin’s dominance over Leinster, it is hard to envisage days such as that returning, when the likes of Laois, Kildare, Meath and Westmeath were challengers. Brogan, though, doesn’t subscribe to that view.
‘Dublin are on a roll at the moment but I don’t think it will last forever. Things are cyclical. The likes of Bernard, he is coming close to the end, has just a year or two left in him, even the likes of Paul Flynn, he is over 30 now. And who is going to replace Stephen Cluxton?
‘That will be a huge void for Dublin to fill and something that other teams will be able to exploit. ‘Outfield players can be replaced, albeit there are special players playing for Dublin at the moment but Stephen Cluxton has just been there for so long, and so much of Dublin’s game has been built around him, his strengths and kick-outs, and he has been Dublin captain for the past four or five years so they will be big shoes to fill when the time comes.’
So Brogan feels there is a bit of hope for everyone else to cling to. Which is encouraging because for anyone in Parnell Park last Thursday, or viewed the staggering scope of talent on show in the first round of the Dublin championship, it’s difficult to escape the sense that there’s a blue hue to Gaelic football’s future.