Pitfalls of cruising53 into a final are not lost on Blues’ boss
IT is his default position anyhow, but Jim Gavin’s desire to preach caution following last Sunday’s All-Ireland semi-final romp over Tyrone was designed to make an impact.
‘This time last year we turned up to an All-Ireland final and didn’t perform,’ Gavin told the media, already hosing water on a performance that many pundits declared the most impressive of his five-year reign.
It would be stretching it to suggest that Gavin was attempting to get in a preemptive strike in the knowledge that his charges would be hailed as three-in-a-row champion in waiting after that 12-point demolition of the Ulster champions because his team are masters of living inside the bubble these days.
But it may have been a personal acknowledgment of the discomfort that all managers feel when, after producing a close-to-perfect performance, they realise they still have to find one to back it up to make it count.
The noise that filled Croke Park 28 minutes into last Sunday’s All-Ireland semi-final may not have helped his mood, which was even more emotionally restrained than usual.
It was quite surreal that with more than half of the game remaining, Dublin supporters were teased into a chorus of ‘oles, oles’ as they watched their favourites play pass the parcel, while their beaten opponents watched on helplessly.
It’s the sound that all GAA managers hate to hear ever since Meath supporters cheered every pass down the home strait of the 2001 semi-final against Kerry and were hailed as Sam Maguire shoo-ins on the strength of it.
Four weeks later they were left in a heap by Galway in the final and the only sound in the ears of Seán Boylan and his beaten players were the muffled funeral condolences of the well-meaning.
It is one of the modern days cliches in sport that semi-finals are all about the winning, which suggests that the finals are there to be lost.
That, of course, is not the reality but for those looking at Sunday week’s final through blue-tinted lenses, that is how it will feel.
That’s the curse of the great semi-final performance, but is it one that really holds up to scrutiny? Then again, how can you take a measure?
Over the last 20 years, the team which boasted the biggest winning margin in the semifinal ended up as champions just eight times.
Indeed, that has become a more pronounced trend latterly with six of the last eight who bounced into the final on the back of the bigger semi-final win ending up losing, which amounts to just a 25 per cent follow-up rate.
But, in truth, that number tells very little.
All you have to do is go back 12 months to last year’s semifinals, where Mayo had seven points to spare over Tipperary while Dublin finished just two ahead of Kerry, yet there was no doubting who had produced the bigger performance.
There have been many others in the past 20 years, where the consensus was that the team who won by the smaller margin had achieved the bigger bounce.
Tyrone’s epic one-point win over Armagh in 2005, Mayo’s thrilling win over Dublin the following year and Kerry’s one-point squeeze past the Dubs 12 months later all fit into that category.
But if you readjust the figures to allow for that subjective appraisal, it comes in at almost 50/50 with the more impressive semi-final performers winning in nine out of 20 finals.
But the reality is that the only pressure semi-final winners feel is when they are deemed to have put in the kind of defining performance – like Dublin’s last weekend – that leaves almost no room for improvement.
We are talking about displays that shook the ground, like that Meath 14-point trimming of Kerry, Kerry’s mauling of Cork in 2002, Cork’s dethroning of Tyrone in 2009, Mayo’s epic win over Dublin in 2012 and, of course, Jim McGuiness’s ambush of Dublin in 2014 as well as last year’s breathless win by the champions over Kerry.
We have counted eight of those in the last 20 years and only twice – Tyrone (2003) and Dublin (2013) – has the team that produced a defining performance been able to back it up with an All-Ireland winning one the next day out.
That’s a one-in-four shot which are the kind of odds they will take in Mayo.