You said they won Leinster 3 years ago. They didn’t. They were beaten well by Meath .
Yes, I got the game wrong. The point still stands.
The correct approach imo, focus on skill
Must be good money in Dublin GAA for that to happen as Tyrone lost Peter Donnelly to Ulster Rugby.
The u17 tournament Tyrone won was effectively a B tournament as many of the teams still involved in minor did not have a full contingent at u17.
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Bar Murchan, do Dublin have a player 5ft10 or under in their squad?
I think thats a given at this stage.
Not as good as washing diesel and selling Lithuanian cigarettes I’d imagine.
Weekend was a bit of a conundrum for Croke Park. They’ve wanted to abolish provincial championships for years and create as many meaningless never ending sequence of games as they can with the awful Super 8, the most recent abomination. What yesterday showed is you can’t beat the do or die drama of knock out football. The tried and trusted formula they had from the 1880’s up to 2000 was actually the best formula.
Only a handful of counties can aspire to win an All Ireland but Cavan and Tipperary as we saw yesterday like Clare 1992 and Leitrim 1994 can aspire to win a provincial championship and winning a provincial championship has real meaning when it’s not diluted to almost irrelevance by second chances and back doors.
Then there’s the Dublin conundrum. At this stage in the more typical sporting cycle of dominance they’d be going into the doldrums like Kerry post 1986 or Kilkenny post 2015. They’ve lost to retirement great players of the calibre of the Brogans, Diarmuid Connolly, Paul Flynn, Jack McCaffrey, long-standing defensive lynchpins like Cian O’Sullivan and Philly McMahon becoming very peripheral in the twilight days of their career. They had just 6 starters on Saturday night who started on the first of their 5 in a row All Ireland Final wins over Kerry in 2015.
About half their starting team now are in their first few years of inter-county football - Robert McDaid, Tom Lahiff, Sean Bugler, the younger of the Small brothers, Eoin Murchan, Niall Scully, yet their dominance and the gulf between the rest is only widening.
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Dublin need to be given a bye to the Super 8’s.
They want lads to be tall and fast. It’s been a policy since 2011 or 2012. Once lads have the athleticism and size they can work on the rest.
Maybe other counties do it but underage in clubs there is huge emphasis on using two feet and two hands - skill tests all look at it and weakness on one side is coached and coached.
That’s actually not an awful idea. Preserve all the provincial championships except without Dublin in Leinster.
@Juno you’re basically right that the stakes are higher when it’s straight knockout but covid19 means that the Monaghan boys, the Kerry boys, the Tyrone boys, the Galway boys, all of them in fact sacrificed their entire lives for almost a year just for 1 game of football and it just can’t be morally justified.
That’s where the numbers game becomes Dublin’s ultimate advantage.
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It is because it’s been systemised.
I see it in my group. 120 kids. 5 per cent very strong. One or two are exceptional. The key is to then engage them, keep them interested in the sport and coach them.
Working with that many kids takes a huge amount of organisation and time from parents.
But that’s it, Dublin have 10-15 times the numbers counties from their closest rivals have. So while some counties might be bringing through once in a generation player every 10 years, Dublin should be doing it every season through sheer weight of numbers.
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County is all very well, but it’s not as important as club
A shame the Derry club scene has been so uncompetitive of late.
That’s true but counties like Cork, Kildare, Meath have big and growing populations and in Cork case a huge number of clubs and don’t seem to be doing it.
The one thing I would take from hurling and football and watching kids being coached is it’s very hard for a parent who has not played hurling to a reasonable degree to coach kids hurling. It can be done much more easily with football as it’s a much less steep learning curve.
It’s numbers but it’s numbers aligned with a coaching system run off huge numbers of parents. The hurling system struggles as it relies on a smalller pool of parent coaches.