NO DEAD ENDS FOR DUBLIN’S BEST AND BRIGHTEST
PADDY Christie could have picked a better time to suggest there are signs that the Dublin football ‘juggernaut’ may be slowing.
Despite securing a 10th Leinster Championship in a row last month, the former Dublin fullback believes that the production line is finally beginning to splutter in the capital.
‘It might be a bit controversial, I don’t think the same conveyor belt is coming through and that’s maybe a cause for concern,’ said Christie, who managed the Dublin minors in 2015 and 2016 and is now a coach with the Tipperary footballers.
‘Maybe it’s a good thing as regards people complaining that Dublin are too strong, it won’t last forever and the days of a juggernaut for Dublin... I’m not so sure about that.
‘There are players underage coming through but they are not to the same extent or the same quality. Even with Sean Bugler and Paddy Small, neither of them were victorious underage.
‘The first year we got beat in a Leinster semi-final by a very strong Kildare team by three points when Paddy was corner forward and the following year we were well beaten by Meath, so there are signs that things are beginning to change.
‘You can’t see it just crumbling overnight. It will slowly drop a level, and then you’d imagine other teams will move up a couple of levels,’ said Christie.
Hope then for the rest? An argument can be made. Dublin’s dominance at senior level in Leinster stands in stark contrast to their struggles to underage, particularly at minor level.
Since 2010, Kildare have won as many provincial minor titles as Dublin (four each) with the Dubs losing five times in that grade to the Lilywhites, twice to Meath (including a 10-point mauling in 2016) and Wicklow in 2018.
Just how much comfort anyone can take from that is questionable.
Kerry serve as the best reminder of the folly of correlating underage potential to elite success.
Their failure to win an All-Ireland title at minor level between 1994 and 2014 became something of an obsession but that did not stop them winning six Sam Maguires in that time, while their subsequent run of five consecutive All-Ireland minor titles (201418) has generated suffocating levels of expectation but little else.
As ever, individual quality can be gleamed, and how talented kids develop into adult players — all the more significant since the age group dropped to under-17
— is critical. On that measure, Dublin’s pulse is healthy.
If some element of democracy has flourished at minor level, at under- 20 ( formerly under- 21) Dublin have won nine out of the last 11 Leinster Championships and are one game away from winning a fifth All-Ireland — they face Galway in this year’s decider on December 19 — since 2010.
That means that even when the likes of Small and Bugler are part of losing minor teams, they win at the next grade. Both were part of the All-Ireland under-21-winning set-up in 2017.
There are no dead ends for Dublin’s bright young things, just occasional speed bumps.
‘How can Kildare be as competitive as Dublin at underage level, winning as many minors as they have in the last decade, and yet at senior level there is this chasm,’ said former Kildare player Andriú Mac Lochlainn in an interview with the Irish Mail on Sunday.
‘And those Dublin players are developed, bled into winning teams where they are regularly exposed to game-time in Croke Park, and, of course, all their established players want to stay because their commitment is being rewarded while all around them other counties are losing players because the possibility of those rewards don’t exist.’
Dublin’s superior resources have helped develop their younger players, not least in terms of conditioning, but their strength in depth also means that they are not in the habit of rushing their best talent.
Brian Howard, Con O’Callaghan and Bugler — the latter putting in a man-of-the-match performance in last year’s dead rubber game against Tyrone — were all brought into the group but deliberately held back at least a season to ensure they were primed to hit the ground running when they were already comfortable in their skins as Dublin footballers..
Perhaps people are l ooking i n the wrong place f or the conveyor belt.
Three of the four clubs who reached this year’s county semifinals — Ballymun, Kilmacud and Ballyboden — were made up of homegrown Dublin players.
Of the cumulative 90 players listed on their senior panels, only Ballymun’s James Burke (a member of the Mayo management team), was not a product of their club system.
That is a significant change inside a decade.
Robbie McDaid was a member of the most talented Dublin underage team in the last decade; one ironically that lost to the 2011 minor final to Tipperary but still produced Eric Lowndes, John Small, Jack McCaffrey, Cormac Costello, Paul Mannion and Ciaran Kilkenny.
Nine years on and Ballyboden star McDaid has shown that there are other ways to make the step-up as the Dublin club game, thriving on the back of both unprecedented investment and player numbers, is ensuring if one production l i ne stalls, there will always be another there to back it up.
‘Democracy has flourished at minor level’