DUBS WILL THANK MAYO IN YEARS TO COME
The Blues are tearing up the script as they garner title after title but, without Mayo constantly snapping at their heels, it could be a different story
THE thin line between love and hate, respect and revilement, found expression last Sunday evening deep in the bowels of Croke Park. Less than an hour after Stephen Cluxton had assured the Mayo players from the Hogan Stand podium that the champions ‘ had the upmost of respect’ for them, it was a little thinner on the ground.
As some of the Mayo players emerged from their dressing room it prompted a scattering of spontaneous applause from onlookers, while a couple of Dublin players looked on.
‘I’ll be f***ed if I am clapping them,’ one was overheard saying to the other. If that sounds mean-spirited, context is a sympathetic friend. These two groups have been literally hopping off each other for half a dozen years now and, with every passing year, the heat has kept rising.
It’s why it is the most compelling rivalry in Irish sport right now, and if mutual respect was the only hook this thing had going for it, we wouldn’t be getting All-Ireland finals of oxygen-sucking intensity.
Like all fierce sporting rivalries, particularly lop-sided ones where the hurt is all on the one side, these two teams have developed a healthy dislike for each other. It is to be found in testy exchanges. In their last five Championship games, 10 players have walked to the line (three red-carded, seven black carded).
Cruelly, though, it is a rivalry that has only been to one team’s benefit.
While Mayo will endure another winter of soft talk of being a cursed tribe, Dublin will bask in the knowledge that their greatness has been cemented.
Three-in-a-row will do that for a team and Dublin became the 10th — and the fourth representing the capital county — to hit that watermark.
It is, however, a far less common achievement in modern times. The Dubs bridged a 94-year gap since their previous triple win and, last Sunday, became the first since Kerry in 1986 to rack up that treble.
Where this places Jim Gavin’s team in the game’s all-time pantheon is another question, but there is a growing consensus that they are breathing hard down the necks of Kerry’s celebrated team from the 1970s and 80s.
It is unlikely that this Dublin team will ever match that Kerry team in terms of quantity – a four-in-a-row (1978-81) and a three-in-a row (198486) takes beating. Yet Kerry’s most recent three-in-a-row dates badly when compared with what Jim Gavin’s team has managed to date.
It took O’Dwyer’s team just 13 games (12 wins and a draw) to get it done. In contrast, last Sunday’s final was Dublin’s 20th Championship game (18 wins and two draws) without defeat since that 2014 AllIreland semi-final loss to Donegal
What’s more, Dublin are operating in a more competitive back-door environment which is why, for the past two seasons, they have been pushed hard by a Mayo team which reached All-Irelands fuelled by the momentum of a run of qualifier wins.
Kerry operated in simpler cutand-dried times, when there was no way back for a dangerous rival — had one existed — who had lost at the provincial stage.
On the face of it, Dublin have had it easier. Their average winning margin has been in excess of nine points a game, while Kerry’s came in at just under eight.
But the big difference is that while Kerry have had relative comfort on All-Ireland final day — their aggregate win was 17 points. Dublin’s tally stands at five points over four finals, when last year’s drawn game is included.
While Kerry were winning their All-Ireland finals by over five points a game, Dublin are squeezing through by a single point.
There is a reason for that; Kerry were dominant when the game was in one of its lull periods in that its main rival was a Dublin team that was a distinct paler shade of blue to the team that charmed the 1970s.
But this Dublin team have been pressed hard by both Kerry and Mayo, and yet not a glove has been laid on them.
They have found a way, repeatedly, to win big games by small margins.
Declan Darcy, one of the central figures in Jim Gavin’s management team, points to Dublin’s thrilling semi-final win over Kerry in 2013 as the moment that set them on the path to greatness.
‘When we were down four or five points and won by seven. That was some turnaround because, in the 68th minute, it was still level.
‘It is staggering what they can do. There was always that belief in the group that the players that are there at the end are when we are at our strongest. That’s when they kick for home,’ he suggested this week.
There is a reason for that, too. Dublin are blessed with a special kind of depth — 34 players have featured in this three-in-a-row run, significantly more than the 26 which Mick O’Dwyer engaged back in the 1980s.
But quantity is one thing, quality another. It is staggering to think that the team who have gone unbeaten in their last 20 games lost in a practice match to their second string the week before the final.
It is not quite so staggering, though, when you see how the B specials attack lined out with Paul Flynn, Diarmuid Connolly, Cormac Costello, Kevin McManamon, Eoghan O’Gara, Bernard Brogan.
That old Bill Shankly boast about how the only team capable of beating Liverpool was the Liverpool reserves hangs heavy for a reason.
But a surplus of talent does not
fully explain why Dublin have retained their edge to be the most hard-nosed team in the game.
Mayo, though, might. They have pushed Dublin physically and have stress-tested the champions’ gut in a way that others, including Kerry, have not been able to.
‘They’re just hugely physical games, not just hitting-wise, but running-wise. Everything’s notched up,’ Cian O’Sullivan explained this week. ‘They seem to raise their game to a different level when they’re playing us each year, I don’t know what it is exactly.’
It is down to lot of things, but it is mainly sourced in the manic desire of a team knocking its head against a wall since 2011 and refusing to go away.
The wonder is that this Dublin team, faced by this ferocious desire which fuels their principal rivals, refuses to be softened by success and always find a response to match.
But as midfielder James McCarthy put it this week, there is really is no wonder to it.
‘We’ve massive hunger in our team as well. People don’t realise that. Obviously Mayo are chasing their first All-Ireland in so many years, but when you get the first one it gives you belief, and it also makes you feel how good it is to do it so you can to get there again and again.
‘You don’t want to be known as the team that won just one or two. You want to be known as one of the really great teams.’
They are that now but, without Mayo pushing them so hard that may not have been the case.
Deep down, that is something in time that they will all applaud Mayo for.