THE GREATEST
Football’s best ever teams can’t be split right now but the drive for five and Jim’s long term strategy will settle debate
FOR now, people will have their own opinions on whether Jim Gavin’s Dublin or Mick O’dwyer’s Kerry is the greatest.
But the argument will likely be settled definitively in the coming years by weight of numbers on either side. By matching their feat of four-in-a-row last Sunday, Dublin have made their biggest statement yet in being ranked alongside, or above, the Kerry team that started their own unbeaten run 40 years ago.
For the time being, however, Kerry’s eight All-irelands in 12 seasons back then probably just shades the six in eight Dublin have achieved since 2011.
Of course, if Dublin were to win the five-in-a-row next year, that would settle the argument.
However, while there’s a fairly obvious starting and end point to O’dwyer’s team spanning from 1975-86, it’s unlikely to be so clearcut with Dublin.
Comparing the respective four-in-a-row winning teams, Dublin have used 24 different starting players in their victori-
ous finals compared to just 17 for Kerry.
Six more players have seen action off the bench for Dublin to bring the total to 30, 10 more than Kerry used over the span of their victories over Dublin (twice), Roscommon and Offaly.
Even at that, O’dwyer’s hand was largely forced by injury.
The only real ongoing duel for a position was that between Ger O’keeffe and Mick Spillane in defence, with the latter coming out on top three times.
Ger Power missed the 1979 All-ireland final with a hamstring injury and had to be replaced during the following year’s decider with another injury, with Tommy Doyle and Ger O’driscoll benefiting as a result.
Eoin ‘Bomber’ Liston had to sit out the 1980 final having had his appendix removed.
A knee injury forced Pat Spillane out in 1981 and his introduction at the tail end of that year’s final was more of a sentimental gesture by O’dwyer (below, with Jack O’shea) than anything else.
It was also the only final in the four-in-a-row run in which the
Kerry manager made more than one substitution.
It must be pointed out, however, that a maximum of just three substitutions were permitted back then; Gavin can make twice that number nowadays and almost always does.
Of the various changes that Gavin has made from final to final in his side’s four-in-a-row run, none of them have been injury-enforced, with Rory O’carroll and Jack Mccaffrey’s departures after the 2015 campaign the only ones he had no control over.
With the average age of the Dublin team dropping as it smoothly evolves, who knows where to draw the line between the end of one team and the beginning of another?
After their fivein-a-row dreams were dashed in 1982, Kerry returned to win a three-in-a-row with the same hard core of players from 1984-86, albeit with a few key changes as defensive pillars like John O’keeffe and Tim Kennelly retired.
But the team didn’t evolve swiftly enough to allow Kerry to remain successful once the golden generation’s powers waned.
After 1986, they won just two Munster titles in the next decade before finally returning to the summit in 1997.
“One of the problems with a successful manager, and it was a problem with Mick O’dwyer in Kerry, is that you remain loyal to the guys who delivered Allireland titles,” commented Pat Spillane a few years back.
“And I remember with Mick O’dywer, he remained loyal to all of us when we were past our sell-by date and the problem was that in ’86, because he had remained loyal to so many of the old guys with lots of mileage, youngsters weren’t being brought through.”
If O’dwyer missed a trick in that regard, Gavin certainly hasn’t. Tommy Doyle. Ger Power.