CASH IS KING AND DUBLIN HOLD ALL OF THE ACES
Dublin’s success is quite rightly celebrated, but the rest of the country is crying out for similar financial assistance
BACK when U2 were in their prime, Bono nailed one of the great home truths about his tribe. ‘In the United States you look at the guy that lives on the mansion on the hill and you think, “you know, if I work really hard I could live in that mansion”,’ said the front man.
‘In Ireland, people look up at the mansion on the hill and go, “one day I am going to get that bastard”.’
Had he not been resting his voice from Gaelic football unrelated activity, he would have gone down a bomb at Smithfield last Monday night as Dublin senior footballers celebrated their greatness among their own.
But it is a greatness which some cruelly perceive as less of a team sent from the heavens and more of one which fell straight out of a flipchart presentation.
Greatness is something that does not come along every day and when it does, it should be applauded
There are numbers out there that can be used to nail the accusation that this Dublin team has been conceived by strategy, science and spondulas.
We are not buying that. The argument has been made that what we are witnessing is not a once-in-ageneration team, but a dynasty that has come straight out of a wellfinanced boardroom.
It is a shallow one, though. Thirty players (24 starters) have featured in Dublin’s last four All-Ireland finals, while Kerry used just 20 players (17 starters) when collecting four Sam Maguire Cups between 1978 and 1981.
The implication is that you are comparing a Kerry team to two Dublin teams.
But that does not stack up. Kerry operated in a time when it was all about the starting team and the three subs were only used in direct correlation to how many times the St John’s Ambulance crew needed to be engaged.
Dublin play a different game with far greater demands.
Should they arrive at next year’s All-Ireland final unblemished – and that is now a near certainty – they will go into their five-in-a-row decider 35 games unbeaten, where Kerry were at 19 when the wheels came off in 1982.
And for all the change, 10 of the team that saw game-time in the 2011 All-Ireland final against Kerry were still involved in the Dublin squad last Sunday – excluding Darren Daly, who was an unused sub.
Incidentally, only six Kerry players from that final were still togging out for the Kingdom this summer, so let’s not make out Dublin’s evolution to be something it is not.
But, equally, let’s not close our eyes and ears and pretend that the shovelling of central funds in its direction hasn’t skewed the playing pitch.
Journalist Ewan McKenna, whose sterling work on this issue deserves much credit, reminded us this week that in the last 10 years, Dublin received €16.6 million in games development funds, while beaten finalists Tyrone got €560,000.
Also, between 2010 and 2014, while Tyrone was in receipt of development funding that amounted to €21 per registered player (with Mayo on €22 and Kerry on €19), Dublin received €274.40 per player.
What we don’t know is how that funding translates in its impact at elite level, but some hard questions would have to be asked of Dublin if it has not been put to good use.
And yet there are some, like former Dublin star Alan Brogan, who live in a bubble and seek to argue that it has nothing to do with money. That Dublin’s dominance is down to character, desire and good management.
And it is down to all those things, but in a week when football lost a good manager in Kevin McStay, who cited the financial demands placed on smaller counties as one of his reasons for walking away from Roscommon, Brogan’s words sounded hollow.
‘There are other counties who have spent big money on new stadiums or centres of excellence,’ claimed Brogan. But, then, if you don’t have the luxury of a full-time coach at club level – half of which is centrally funded – you might not find it so pressing to have a centre of excellence to pool resources and target elite players.
And if you don’t have an 80,000 capacity stadium that you can slip into to call home then the chances are you might have to build one or the GAA won’t let you play on your own patch.
For all the talk of the GAA’s lop-sided funding (something which will now be addressed because the GAA know that if they don’t the future is going to be grim) the altering of Croke Park’ status from being a national stadium to Dublin’s home ground is the most serious of all. It has sabotaged the integrity of their competitions and will continue to do so into the future, because home advantage is not a perceived blessing but a real one.
In the last 10 minutes of their clash back in July, Tyrone turned over Stephen Cluxton four times in the final 10 minutes.
Last Sunday, after the second of his two errant kicks went over the sideline in the ninth minute, Tyrone never got a paw on his restarts after that as Dublin exploited the space on the pitch which they know and are conditioned for, like no-one else.
There are things that can be done; taking Dublin’s home Allianz League games out of Croke Park – where their average attendance was barely over 20,000 last year – would be a starting point.
Future generations of Dublin players should not see this place as home, or otherwise the rest will come to view it as a killing field.
The price of not doing so – and we have already seen it in the Super 8s this summer – is to undermine the integrity of a Championship that is already shedding support.
What is needed now is not the dispersal of the GAA’s loose change, but rather its absolute commitment to everyone getting to play on a level field.
What is needed now is that the sitting tenants vacates the mansion and let it be used as the summer house for all as it was intended to
Future Dublin players should not see Croke Park as home