FITZSIMONS WARY OF THREAT POSED BY IN-FORM TYRONE FRONT MEN
IT SEEMS like the whole summer has been building towards a showdown between Dublin and Tyrone on August 27 but Mick Fitzsimons insists that he hadn’t thought of the possibility of facing the Ulster champions until the All-Ireland holders comfortably dealt with Monaghan on Saturday. Prior to their own quarterfinal, the Dublin players caught a glimpse of Tyrone’s easy win over Armagh, but not enough to hold a firm opinion of what to expect in their semi-final. ‘I hadn’t looked that far ahead, at all,’ says Fitzsimons. ‘We only had a week to work on Monaghan so you couldn’t look past that. We knew it was going to be a test against them. ‘We didn’t get a chance to see Tyrone on Saturday. We kinda just walked out and sat there for five minutes and saw a few passages of play. Nothing major. We haven’t had a chance to look at it yet. That will all be starting soon. Doing a bit of work on that. The last time I saw them, we were playing them in the League and they looked good then.’ It took Dean Rock’s lastminute free to salvage a draw in that League game in Croke Park. Things will be a little different in high summer, but Fitzsimons was impressed by Tyrone that February evening. ‘From the League game, they were very physical and they are very good on the counter-attack. They have great forwards and they all seem quite inter-changeable. ‘They are all very accurate and all very agile. And it just seems like they are very organised aswell,’ says the tigerish corner-back, who shackled Conor McManus superbly last weekend. The suggestion is that Jim Gavin has tapered his preparation for Dublin differently this year, as they go in search of a third All-Ireland title on the trot. He brought his players back a little later during the winter and gave them a five-week break between League and Championship. Fitzsimons says the preparation is the same as what they did in 2011 when Pat Gilroy led Dublin to their first AllIreland in 16 years. ‘It was just a bit different this year because we had never been away in January, so we were just that bit later back, and we had never played in an All-Ireland final in October so everything was put back a month.
‘But I remember it is similar to what we did in 2011, when you got two rounds of club championship, which was good.’ Having being thrown in for the All-Ireland final replay last October — and winning the man of the match award — Fitzsimons has been a fixture in the Dublin defence this year. He has always been known as a sticky man-marker but he claims that he has worked on other aspects of his game. ‘I probably learned a few things during the League and have been able to add them to my game a bit. ‘You look back on the League and fine-tune little bits and pieces, try to stay focused for the full 80 minutes of the game. That’s another challenge as a corner-back. ‘Anything can drag your mind away to something else. ‘You might have one or two bad plays and at cornerback, that could be the difference between winning and losing the game and the difference between keeping your place in the team.’