JIG OR TWO LEFT IN FARRELL’S SKY BLUES
Last Dance myth is shattered by boss’s decision to stay at helm
AND so Dublin’s Last Dance gets a sequel. It hardly qualified as a surprise when confirmation arrived last Friday night that Dessie Farrell would be staying in charge next season, with the promise that he would hang around until the end of 2025 as well.
On the flip side, though, had he announced that he was not seeing out the final year of his existing two-year term, it would have been at best a surprise, but would still have fallen well shy of the tremors generated by the departure of his predecessor Jim Gavin in November, 2019.
The difference was that no one was expecting Gavin to leave the floor, even in the aftermath of the seismic achievement of winning the five-in-a-row, whereas this time, the prospect of Farrell packing up was not just a possibility, it was one that came with its own soundtrack.
All summer, Dublin rocked to
“Farrell has always known his own mind”
the beat of a Last Dance narrative, one which he was central in creating.
The returns of Paul Mannion and Jack McCaffrey initially, and the reappearance of Pat Gilroy, who played a key role in securing Stephen Cluxton’s recall, gave it that vibe.
And the privately declared mission to get James McCarthy up the Hogan Stand steps — in the process ensuring the Dublin captain, Cluxton and Michael Fitzsimons became the most decorated players in the history of the game — sauced the narrative that this was a much as a one-off Netflix special as a football championship campaign.
Thus when it all came to pass, the obvious closing scene was a silhouetted shot of them all walking off into the sunset.
If nothing else, Farrell’s reaffirmation of his commitment to the cause reveals the absolute truth, rather than the sugared version so easily consumed.
They are hardcore winners, not dewy-eyed sentimentalists.
Of course, Farrell’s decision to stay will be interpreted as confirmation that the others are staying as well.
‘Everybody would love to see them. They have been tremendous servants of Dublin football over the last 10 years and more and it will be a sad day for the city when they do decide to hang up the boots and we’ll give them time to make the decision,’ said Farrell last month, in an interview in which he was still coy about his own future.
The expectation was that Mannion and McCaffrey were likely to come back — at 30 and 29 respectively, time is on their side — while McCarthy is such a driven individual that it is hard not to see him do the same.
It might be a taller ask for Michael Fitzsimons because the role he plays — and one he played quite brilliantly this season — is an unforgiving one, charged with putting the shackles on the country’s top forwards.
And let’s not pretend we have a notion as to what Cluxton’s next move is.
Suffice to say that Farrell does — it is virtually certain those discussions have already taken place — and it is unlikely his decision to remain was conditional on who was or wasn’t coming back.
Farrell has always known his own mind, which is why he accepted the challenge to become Gavin’s successor.
In so many ways, it seemed like an impossible job.
He was taking over a team that had gone where no team has gone before.
Gary Neville made the point at the weekend, when discussing Manchester City’s stuttering form of late, that his most difficult season in his Manchester United was in 2000, the year after the club had won the treble, because they had invested so much in making history that it mentally drained them as a team.
In a similar way, that represented the challenge facing Farrell at the beginning of 2020. But with the bells and whistles on top in that with an aging and potentially sated group, with only modest levels of options to infuse new talent, it was one he could easily have shirked.
At best, the perceived wisdom was that he would not be around for long, given the likelihood that there was so little juice left to squeeze.
Instead, should he see out his latest term — and the usual suspicion that the extra year he has committed to may be about quelling questions that next season really will be the Last Dance — he will be in charge for six years, making him the county’s thirdlongest-serving manager behind Gavin and Kevin Heffernan.
But he is hardly just about serving time. Should Dublin defend their All-Ireland title next year, he will match Heffernan’s record of managing the county to three Sam Maguire wins, which is quite staggering given the whispers of discontent among supporters little over 12 months ago when Dublin had failed to reach the All-Ireland final for the second successive year.
What was lost in that stat was how close he had come.
Arguably, two kicks of a ball — Robbie Hennelly’s retaken 45 in the 2019 semi-final and Seán O’Shea’s boomer 12 months later — stood between Dublin and winning the All-Irelands in those two seasons.
Of course, it is too simplistic to say that Dublin could have won nine in a row — there are always consequences to success and not all are positive — but Farrell has seen enough over the last four years to know that there is a jig or two still left in this group.
“He is hardly just about serving time”