The ‘dynasty’ starts to crumble
FOR AN EMPIRE tipped to rule the age, the Dublin ascendancy is looking awfully mortal. The era of blue rule was remarkable, running unchecked between 2015 and 2020, and it spawned reasonable concerns around some of the contributory factors.
The unfair advantage handed to one team getting to play all of their home games in Croke Park is still to be properly addressed, and the imbalances in aspects of the central funding directed into Dublin, compared to other counties needs to be more fully tackled, too.
But the six in a row also fostered some awful nonsense, with hysterical predictions that Dublin would destroy the game prominent among the overreactions.
And the more time moves on from the last of the Jim Gavin titles, in 2019, the more it becomes clear that a great deal of the brilliance of that team was down to timing.
A rare gush of talent coalesced around a magnificent manager, and the result was spellbinding.
But it’s turned out that Stephen Cluxton is not the inevitable result of a flood of money concentrated in one county, that as the examples of Jack McCaffrey and Paul Mannion have shown, Dublin don’t have an answer for every problem, and it’s also transpired that the supply lines that were so well husbanded in the Gavin era, can actually start to look stretched.
Blue rule is no more.
That’s not to say Dublin will disappear as they did between 1995 and the Pat Gilroy revival in the late 2000s, that eventually resulted in the 2011 Championship.
The structures introduced in the years of plenty, and those predating them that helped to bring forth the plenty in the first place, should remain.
A capacity for sound decisionmaking at the executive level has also been crucial, but the extent to which the Gavin transition was handled, and now the confusion scudding around Dessie Farrell, shows that even the best-run counties are vulnerable to indecision, confusion and the myriad of difficulties that eventuate.
Whatever Farrell’s eventual fate, it seems remarkable that news of a surprising career change for Declan Darcy last week could exercise such a profound influence on discussion around the Dublin position. In effect, the theorising went as follows: if Farrell goes, he should be replaced by Darcy, loyal consigliere to Gavin, respected by the players, and a link to the days of glory.
Now, Darcy is joining Leinster Rugby and there seems no obvious direction in which Dublin might go. Jason Sherlock is being persistently linked with a role in Monaghan, and Paddy Christie, one of the consistently impressive figures at grassroots and club level in the county, has now appeared on the proposed management team in Mayo fronted by Declan Shaw.
The notion that Dublin leave nothing to chance is being uncomfortably probed by circumstances.
But recall the way the Gavin departure emerged. The news came out on the last Saturday in November in 2019, and on December 12, Farrell was announced as his successor.
In between the two events, there were days of speculation, with most of it insisting Darcy was the preferred candidate, of the players at least. There followed suggestions he had been sounded out about putting his name forward, gossip that grew in volume when the possibility of a Gilroy return was discounted.
Farrell ended up getting the role, and it offered continuity, given his AllIreland-winning record at minor and Under 21 level.
Yet that the most complete force in the history of Gaelic games, a powerhouse moulded by brilliance on the field and judicious management at board level, was left dealing with all of this in deep winter, at a time when Dublin’s most plausible rivals were already deep in planning for the coming year, revealed some stark fallibilities in a machine we supposed to be near-flawless.
The Farrell era itself has to be fairly judged and that means factoring in the two seasons effectively lost to Covid. Of course a mortifying Covid breach in the midst of the lockdown of spring 2020, when the schools were still largely shuttered and the population were obliged to adhere still to some significant restrictions, was damaging, both reputationally but also to that image, so painstakingly – if not always convincingly – maintained by Gavin, of a county and a squad that do what’s right.
But more damaging in the court of public justice was the All-Ireland semi-final defeat to Mayo.
On its own, that loss could have been attributed to the times, but when it was followed by relegation to Division 2 this spring, the sense of inexorable decline took a turn for the definite.
The strongest aspect of Farrell’s defence is obviously the 2020 AllIreland title that sealed six in a row, and the doughty survival effort in this year’s semi-final against Kerry was not the desperate defiance of a team not playing for their manager.
But that the second-half fightback relied on a veteran near the end of his great career in James McCarthy, and on a mainstay with huge mileage already logged in Ciarán Kilkenny, also helped to show how difficult it has been for Farrell to integrate viable new components into a system that is starting to rust.
Players that looked good in the League were left gasping in the heightened atmosphere of a Championship do-or-die against Kerry.
And if his three-year term, agreed when he was appointed, is extended for another season or two, this is the aspect of his work in those extra campaigns against which Farrell will be most keenly judged.
In that regard, Division 2 football next spring is being represented as a positive, and it should help Farrell, or whoever replaces him, to test more hopefuls for the most challenging role in football – outside, perhaps, of the Kerry one.
It’s been unsurprising, but also another sign of Dublin’s severely limited hand, that Gilroy’s name has started to reappear in considerations of the Dublin job.
He was critical to the restoration job made beautiful by Gavin, and Jack O’Connor is the most dazzling example of the virtues of a manager going back.
But Dublin aren’t in the grip of the type of decline from which Gilroy’s disciplined, often ascetic approach, freed them. The team needs to be overhauled, not broken down and rebuilt. But the attractiveness of Gilroy is obvious.
And in a landscape where Kerry are reborn, Tyrone will be snorting to prove themselves again, and Mayo and Donegal will have new managers, the Dublin manager on New Year’s Day will survey the scene and he will be entitled to think that a bountiful year awaits.
But he will also rely on the same degree of wishful thinking that all his contemporaries will, too.
And that’s a big change for the manager of the Dublin footballers.
No empire lasts, but those that best endure adapt. The governors of Dublin football have shown themselves quick learners.
Heeding that advice seems vital now.
No empire lasts forever, but those that best endure learn to adapt