It may not sell out
Dublin are angry and ravenous and ready to spit fire
Dublin players ahead of their clash with Cork
July 05 2022 01:19 PM
It was a first jolting introduction to mortality for a team that seemed to have advanced beyond earthly limits.
That August Saturday in 2021 when Mayo rendered Croke Park a boneyard for Dublin’s seven-in-a-row ambitions – the towering theatre of dreams reimagined as a cemetery for Sky Blue invincibility – embedded itself on the hard drive of a team for the ages.
The ending of their 45-game, 2,540-day unbeaten championship run introduced these players to unfamiliar music, what Sebastian Barry calls “the dark choir of pain”.
Brian Fenton, who, against Mayo, was – remarkably - enduring a first championship loss in a career that had already yielded five All Stars and two Footballer of the Year gongs, hinted at the effect ten weeks after their fall.
The midfield godfather found himself submitting to “a lot more introspection, just thinking of your own game and where we’re at – and I think that’s the case across the group.”
Six months later, after Dublin’s lost immunity to gravity was confirmed by relegation to Division Two, Fenton would speak again, even more forcibly.
“There’s probably just a bit of a chip on our shoulder. We’re certainly hungry for more success despite all the years of success that we’ve had.”
Here is a storyline that has been scarcely examined as commentators mine into the quarry of data in search of some nugget that will assist them in calling Sunday’s latest summer joust with Kerry.
Dublin are angry and ravenous and ready to spit fire.
It is undeniable that there are lingering concerns – eye-catchingly poor league form, the lack of a meaningful challenge this summer, potential defensive vulnerabilities against an alpha Kerry attack, and, mostly, grave concerns about the fitness of Con O’Callaghan and James McCarthy – but fears about their enduring appetite are not among them.
A team with unrivalled champion pedigree, a dressing-room that is a storehouse for the better part of 100 Celtic crosses, is fuelled by the hunger normally only associated with squads who have lived for too long on the sporting breadline.
Two of the team’s leading figures informed your correspondent that lifting Sam Maguire this year would be “sweeter” than anything that has gone before in their storied careers.
That is some mindset set against a back catalogue of achievement that includes the smashing of just about every landmark in the old game’s history.
Why are Dublin indignant? Their irritability is drawn from several wells.
A frustration that they allowed themselves fall below their own Himalayan standards on and off the field in 2021.
Exhaustion and controversy and Covid distractions buffeted the squad, but, still, there is an internal conviction that they did not exhibit their true face to the world. There is a wish to set the record straight.
As natural-born competitors, something stirred in their blood as they read their own sporting obituaries and, the rush by some to stray into RIP.ie vocabulary.
It was particularly grating to those leading figures who remain in their mid-to-late 20s, the prime of their athletic lives.
As the form of Ciaran Kilkenny, Fenton and, when fit, O’Callaghan has illustrated this summer, these all-time greats remain in perfect harmony of body and mind.
Their impatience to prove the point to a wider audience amounts to a significant weapon in their armoury.
Players will search for grievance if it can be converted into competitive edge.
One player admits he even found some psychological juice in oddsmakers’ lists that elevated Kerry ahead of Dublin in the All-Ireland betting for the first time in a decade.
To borrow from the towering American writer Don DeLillo: “History [is] a force to these men, a presence in the room.”
It is true that there were days during the league when the search for the old invincible Dublin seemed as futile as trying to find light emitting from a dead star.
True also, that there is ample evidence to support the thesis that David Clifford and Kerry’s time has arrived – even if that places a heavy burden of pressure on the Kingdom to deliver on huge expectation.
It was a burden they were ultimately unable to shoulder against Tyrone last summer or Cork the year before.
Kerry have long clung to a belief that the critical difference between in many of their recent duels with Dublin was the inestimable presence of Stephen Cluxton and his choreographing of Sky Blue patterns of play.
In an attempt to gain a psychological foothold they will look to fiercely interrogate Evan Comerford’s kick-out strategy.
Jack O’Connor will relish every opportunity to probe for weakness in a Dublin defence denuded by injury and the ticking clock, one in urgent need of McCarthy’s leadership, aura and physical presence.
Without McCarthy and O’Callaghan, a steep semi-final incline assumes the dimensions of a murderous incline for the Leinster giants.
Against that, they can call on that champion spirit and a deep craving to show, one more time at least, the best of themselves.
Anger, as John Lydon barked all those years ago, is an energy.
For all the magic in Dublin’s feet, it might be the chip on Fenton’s shoulder that represents the great peril to Kerry’s pursuit of old summer certainties.
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Superb… Roy and Philly must be responsible for all the sales of the Indo …
I’d imagine the GAA will come to its senses next year and put the GAA Chamionships back together again.
You cannot have a cohort of mullockers holding the golden goose to ransom
The All-Ireland finals have been moved from their rightful places on the first and third Sundays of September so inter-county players can go on a junket to Chicago.
What a farce.
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An extra 2 months off for some rednecks to make hay in the big city.
For the good of the game obvs
Who will Irish kids watch in August and September now, Crossmaglen? Loughrea?
Dear Lord
You can’t move in the Dublin dressing room for the amount of articles pinned to the wall.
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The sweeping will take forever with the amount of distracting articles in their eyeline.
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Ten Haags warriors.
The European Athletics Championships are going to be box office.
Mudderagawd he just speaks to the common man who used to go to the hill but now gets a carvery at premium/box level, watches bits of the game behind the glass, catches up with what happened in match on Twitter on the way back to Briodys/chaplins/pipers/palace/Cassidy’s
Iconic
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Roy just makes us feel alive.
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Paul Flynn: The cultural and systemic flaws in the GAA ensure that the melee will always be with us
In the GAA, players are conditioned to wade into brawls safe in the knowledge that the disciplinary process is not the end of the matter but only the beginning.
The green luminous gloves were the smoking gun. Dublin were playing Meath and, while it wasn’t like the Dublin-Meath clashes of the previous generation, there was always a sense that you shouldn’t be backward in coming forward at the first sign of trouble. This is the GAA mentality, one for all and all for one, a mentality probably protected too by the knowledge that if you go in all for one, all of you are unlikely to be penalised and if you are suspended you can appeal.
On that day in 2008, I went in without reservation as a brawl broke out. I was young and naïve and wanted to prove to management that I would do anything for the team. I was charged with an infraction under Rule 143 9(b) Category II, which covered my crime, which was “contributing to a melee”.
For my trouble, I was given an eight-week suspension which meant I would miss the league final and the first game in the championship – this wasn’t insignificant for me as it was my first full season so it meant I missed an important game and my championship debut. Others had received four-week suspension and I wasn’t sure what I had done to merit getting double, alongside a few others, Ciaran Whelan, Bernard Brogan and Diarmuid Connolly.
There had been plenty of outrage about the brawl in the media and Pillar Caffrey said we would accept the suspensions and not appeal. I disagreed with this course of action in desperation to not miss out on these two milestone games for me. However, if I had any doubt about this course of action, a viewing of the video changed my mind. I wasn’t doing anything worse than anyone else but the luminous gloves I was wearing would give a different impression. It looked as if I was doing jazz hands as I “contributed to the melee”. I’m still not sure if the lesson I learned from it was not to wear luminous gloves in the future, or not to contribute to a melee.
There had been a fair bit of outrage about that melee too although nothing as comprehensive as the response to what happened at the end of the Armagh-Galway game.
The eye-gouging incident transformed the melee into a matter of “national importance”. The Taoiseach has commented, the Minister of Sport has commented and on social media everyone wanted action now. The man at the centre of affair Tiernan Kelly was viewed only in two dimensional terms. People had made up their minds and they knew what they saw. They wanted a long ban, at the very least.
Maybe a long ban will be the result of this and an eye gouging incident certainly merits one but the calls went beyond that. “This man should never be allowed play again”. These calls infuriated me – in all walks of life, there are very few actions that leads to a ban of infinite duration. The young lad made a mistake, he has been punished by the GAA with a six-month ban and should now be afforded the opportunity to learn from it.
My natural instinct, in situations like these where the trial by social media is in full swing, is to empathise with the accused. In my role at the GPA, I would often be in a position after a weekend like this one where I would try to offer some comfort to a player on the receiving end of ‘moral outrage’.
Of course, there are plenty of people staying silent on social media who recognise that someone can’t be judged by one action but they will perk their heads up when it feels like a safe place to do so – typically when somebody else was first to lead the charge.
Empathising with the accused is by no means being soft on the crime. The fundamental principle I had was to condemn the sin but protect the sinner. The sinner in most of these instances was a young amateur athlete not a menace to society looking for any excuse to cause trouble. The sinner is also a student or your kid’s teacher or your local banker or a dad. That human element of these social media court cases seems to get lost on the commentators. People make mistakes in life but imagine what a difficult and lonely a place it is to deal with them when they are commentated on by politicians and every current affairs programme?
Kelly’s club and team-mates have condemned the response. “The TK I know is a great fella around the club,” his club mate Ryan Henderson told the Irish News.
“He’s a teetotaller and a non-smoker and a role-model for the youngsters. He’d be down helping at underage sessions and doing a lot of work you wouldn’t even hear about.”
But that work that you don’t hear about counts for nothing against the certainty of the online jury. He has made a mistake, will suffer the most and will be appropriately reprimanded by the GAA for his actions.
I don’t think the sanctimonious online care too much for the disciplinary processes of the GAA but to my mind the failed system doesn’t help in these cases.
Malcolm Gladwell described sport as the voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles but when it comes to suspensions and the GAA there is very little acceptance of any obstacles at all.
I found it hypocritical that people could be furious about the eye gouging in one breath and then go on to outline what parts of a melee are acceptable. This is something we discussed further in the podcast that accompanies this piece.
The GAA has a problem with brawls in part because, as I said to begin with, there is very little downside to piling in. If there was, maybe the best thing you could do for your team would be stay out of it.
Instead most players feel their chances of getting off are high. There are two reasons for this. One is a systemic flaw and the other is a cultural flaw, which goes way beyond the GAA.
These incidents and similar incidents this year have brought into focus the flaws in the GAA’s disciplinary processes – these flaws have led to an appeals culture that is deemed acceptable with the pursuit of victory more important than the integrity of the games. These instances are not a welcome sight in our games but in high intensity sport where physicality meets a win at all costs mentality- things can become overheated and escalate.
They will continue to escalate to these unsavoury melees unless a harsh stance is taken by the GAA hierarchy. A stance that goes further than dishing out eight week bans which can be overturned on a technicality. The GAA need to take systemic action and assume full control of their disciplinary processes to the point where an appeal is not only culturally unacceptable but procedurally impossible.
At the moment, it is not the end of the matter but merely the beginning.
He’s wrong though. There’s a sharp line to be drawn this side of a double attempt at eye gouging from behind. He just knows Dublin have form.
No right thinking person would eye gouge on a playing field.
Bizarre article.
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To an extent, but this piece:
is spot on. Players pile in because there is no recrimination for doing so. And some that do get punishment, end up getting off. See Armagh V Donegal, where Donegal accepted their suspension, Armagh didnt, appealed and all 3 players got off and served no ban. Thats wrong. Entirely wrong, and the GAA enable shite like what happened in the Galway game by not being strong in their disciplinary process.
There is a somewhat separate argument as to eye gouging developing as a result of a brawl, and I’d agree with you there, just because there is a brawl doesnt mean that it naturally will develop to eye gouging.
However, a non togged out sub shouldnt be anywhere near that melee, and I’d be of the opinion every person who was not on the playing field at the time who got involved should serve a suspension. They had no business being there. I’d also say any other player, other than Comer and the Armagh guy who started it with him, shouldnt have got involved. But this is the point, the GAA do nothing. Kelly should have been in a position where he knows if he gets involved he’ll be banned. Ultimately he took it a few steps too far. But the set up should have meant he was never there in the first place.
I’d agree with what you say, but he is close to a false equivalence in the tone of that article.
yeah I think the fluff and all the additional commentary he makes kind of dilutes the main point which only needs a paragraph or 2. But then its not a proper word count publishable article.
I’ve never been more certain that an underdog will win a match than Dublin v Kerry. The dubs are absolute certainties Kerry are ridiculously overrated. What’s the injury news? Even though I think they’ll win even without con.
Kerry will win pulling up pal … its their time …
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