WHY DUBLIN ARE THE GREATEST
Kilkenny and Kerry both slipped at five-in-a-row hurdle but Gavin’s men are in a better place
STRAWS were being clutched everywhere this past week. Dublin’s dominance will not last forever, we have been told. It will only go on as long as Jim Gavin and Stephen Cluxton are around. Historical parallels were sought. And found. On social media, @CiaranJ63 offered some faint hope that the role of Seamus Darby next summer will fall to a Tyrone man.
He pointed out that Offaly had lost an All-Ireland semi-final to Kerry in 1980, the final in 1981 before Darby struck to end Kerry’s five-in-a-row bid in 1982. Maybe, history will rhyme for Mickey Harte’s side next summer but in the immediate aftermath of last Sunday, there were few who agreed with that. Dublin were already installed as odds-on favourites to become the first team in GAA history to win five All-Irelands on the trot.
With rivals on the field so difficult to find (unless there is one last hurrah in Mayo when they find Stephen Rochford’s successor) the only true rivals of this team are found on the history pages. Specifically, Brian Cody’s Kilkenny hurling team of the late noughties and Mick O’Dwyer’s Kerry side from 1978-82.
So, how do they compare? On initial inspection, Gavin’s consistent renewal of his playing resources stands out as a salient difference to the great Kingdom side. O’Dwyer managed to lead Kerry to four-in-arow with 17 different players starting the four finals – and 10 of them starting every one.
Of course, it was a different time. Summers were much less hectic for that Kerry team, usually consisting of four games – and there were only three in 1980 when they got a bye directly to the Munster final, a consequence of the 9-21 they scored against Clare in 1979.
Between 2006 and 2009, Brian Cody used 21 different starters in Kilkenny’s four finals, a little surprising considering that great team were thought to be so settled but only eight players started each of the four finals.
As Gavin is now in the conversation with Cody as the greatest GAA manager in history, it is fitting that there are parallels with the two teams in that eight players have started each of the four finals they have won. But Gavin has used far more players – with 25 different starters in the five All-Ireland finals in this sequence (if the 2016 replay with Mayo is included).
And the most striking thing that sets Dublin apart from both Kilkenny and Kerry is that their age profile is actually coming down. The team that started last Sunday’s final was six months younger in average age than the team who started the 2015 final against Kerry.
The average age of the Kerry
team that beat Dublin in 1978 was just over 23. By the time they had beaten Offaly in 1981, the average age was 26.6. The Kilkenny side that started the win over Cork in 2006 were just under 25 (24.9), on average. By the time, they had seen off the challenge of Tipperary in 2009 , that had crept up to almost 27 (26.9).
Contrast that with Dublin. The team that beat Kerry in 2015 had an average age of 26.7. The side that started last Sunday was down to 26.1. Nine of the players who started against Tyrone were 25 or under, compared to only seven in the first final against Kerry. Even if parts of the defence are getting older, and apparently showing their age, the age profile of the side, as a whole, is getting younger.
What makes Dublin’s feat all the more impressive is that they have played a lot more Championship games than either of their two historical counterparts. Kerry managed to win their four-in-a-row by playing just 15 Championship games. Kilkenny played 17 to do their feat. Gavin’s side have played 28 games – and Brian Fenton has been involved in all bar one (Roscommon in the Super 8s this year).
Fenton famously has yet to lose a Championship game in blue. In that regard, he shares the same distinction as Eoin Liston, who never tasted defeat in a Kerry jersey until Seamus Darby intervened in 1982.
Gavin’s regeneration of his team is remarkable. Only three of the Kilkenny side that started the 2006 final had been phased out by the 2009 decider – goalkeeper James McGarry, James Ryall and James ‘Cha’ Fitzpatrick (who left the panel by choice).
Already, five of Dublin’s starting team from the three-point win over Kerry in 2015 have been phased out. They managed to beat Tyrone without contributions from Rory O’Carroll, Diarmuid Connolly, Denis Bastick, Paul Flynn and Bernard Brogan while Cian O’Sullivan went off with a hamstring injury in the first half.
Four years ago, immediately after that arm-wrestle in the rain with Kerry, the prospect of Dublin winning four-in-a-row without those players having a prominent role was unthinkable. They were the team’s most vital outfield players at the start of this run. But that is just another example of Gavin’s regeneration of this team.
Offaly and Tipperary, the two teams that halted the most recent drives-for-five, were focused on one opponent for the entirety of their season, Kerry and Kilkenny, respectively. It meant that Tipp even took their eye off the ball in the 2010 Munster Championship, but they never lost sight of the primary task, taking down the Cats.
Their managers, Eugene McGee and Liam Sheedy, spent a year planning and plotting for one match. But does any manager have that kind of luxury in the present environment? No doubt Mickey Harte has already dissected and analysed what went wrong last Sunday.
But he and his players can’t simply focus on one game for 2019, as they might get tripped up by the various booby-traps on the journey
The most striking thing is that their age profile is coming down
to the final. Dublin’s other two chief rivals, Mayo and Kerry, are currently without a manager. So, Harte is the only one that can resemble McGee and Sheedy, but he has to negotiate past a lot more hazards than either of those men, both in Ulster and in the Super 8s. He can’t devote all his energies to ending the drive-for-five.
‘Nobody is labouring under the illusion that this is something that will continue indefinitely,’ Jack McCaffrey suggested in the Gibson Hotel last Monday. ‘This is a really special group of people and we are going to make hay while the sun is shining.’
It won’t last forever. There will come a time when they are beaten. It just might not be next year. There are no signs of slippage shown by Kerry or Kilkenny as they approached their drive-for-five.
Their average winning margin this season was 12 points, as great as it has been in the past four seasons. Their age profile is coming down. This empire is consistently being renewed.
Dublin have vastly superior resources in finance and playing numbers. That’s not going to change. But that should not take away from this extraordinary group of players. The side that won on Sunday is different to the side that won in 2015. They have morphed into something else.
When Lar Corbett and the movement of the Tipp forwards bamboozled Kilkenny in 2010, it strengthened the belief that five-ina-row was unattainable for any team. But not this Dublin team, because they have kept changing.
The summit that has been beyond the great Kerry and Kilkenny teams is well within their reach. But there is not a sense that they will stop climbing once they scale it.