Liam

Monaghan and Kerry have already pierced the skin, and the very strange but apparently legless tale of Jason Sherlock’s departure from Gavin’s management team will also have got the attention of everyone in the Dublin dressing room.

The whole lot of them in there will have read about it last weekend, or will have heard one of the several explanations doing the rounds concerning the assistant coach’s absence in the early weeks of the season.

They’ll have laughed about it presumably, and talked further amongst themselves in that room about Gavin’s firm denial that Sherlock was now a helper in the past tense. But it will have caught their attention. Another small cut. Anything that stops this Dublin team talking (and thinking) only about their very next performance registers as a cut. That’s three cuts. Add in the second apparently spurious story that jumped up into the air, also last weekend, about Diarmuid Connolly receiving specialist one-on-one coaching from the team’s strength and conditioning guru, Bryan Cullen… and that’s four cuts.

Yeah, Gavin also hit that on the head — telling us down in Tralee, shortly after the defeat to Kerry, that Connolly and Cullen were not asked to get into cahoots in the gym and out on the training field, and put in motion a return of the team’s greatest genius and enfant terrible.

As usual, the Dublin boss was short and sweet in that denial. Neither did he wait around for anyone to ask if Connolly had been receiving hands-on tuition from Sherlock during the period when the latter appeared to be missing from the management team’s inner circle.

I’m not suggesting that happened, or wildly guessing. All I’m saying is that once the players in the Dublin dressing room have their heads turned — first one way, and then the other — it can become quite easy to continue turning those same heads.

Turned heads — yes, you have it — are more cuts, and all of those cuts add up and add up further, and all of a sudden the simple matter of trotting out onto the pitch with the single-minded notion of becoming the first team in history to win five AllIreland titles in succession, is not as natural as it appeared only a little while ago.

LOSING to Monaghan in the first round of the League let Dublin know that winning everything all over again this year was not a total formality. Losing to Kerry last weekend went a little further in awakening the reigning champs to what exactly lies in wait.

Other teams are fed up of losing to Dublin. In fact, the very top teams (Monaghan and Kerry, and count in Mayo too, though not Tyrone who are fast ridiculing their presence in last year’s All-Ireland final) are going to be ganging together in looking to do everything they can to somehow upend the champs. It’s human nature. Just enough teams appear to have tired of playing victim to Gavin and Co. And if they can act in some form of unison — as in Monaghan and Kerry subconsciously conspiring to inflict two quick defeats at the very beginning of the year — then they can leave doubts bobbing up and down in the minds of some Dublin footballers.

Those doubts, funnily enough, will not make much impact in the heads of the young guns Gavin keeps throwing into the mix. Those players are ready to add their tuppence worth to a piece of history. They’re damn hungry.

It’s the older boys, the actual warriors in the dressing room, who might soon enough be asking themselves if life can remain both glorious and simple.

It’s Stephen Cluxton (yes him, with the hot head), and Jonny Cooper and Philly McMahon in front of him, Cian O’Sullivan in front of them, James McCarthy in front of him, and the likes of Paul Flynn, Bernard Brogan, Kevin McManamon and the remainder of the aged brigade who will be vulnerable to second-guessing the surest thing that Dublin will lift Sam in 2019.

All of those esteemed men have achieved more than they ever dreamed of, and all of them in different ways are being distracted by careers far outside the game — and also by marriages and babies, and one or two other choices in life which, eventually, leave Gaelic football to one side.

Gaelic football — a love, but a pastime, and a pursuit that does not pay bills, and acutely robs and robs from other things that can begin to look equally as important as… Gaelic football.

Cuts, and more cuts and more cuts.

That’s how the greatest teams, since the history of time, fall to their knees. And make no mistake about it, Dublin are receiving cuts in the last few weeks. Maybe not enough to stop them from crowning themselves as the greatest team in the history of the game.

But just enough cuts to make the summer of 2019 very interesting indeed.