Dublin must rip up blueprint to build on Daly's legacy

Solid underage system needed for consistency if manager departs
Dermot Crowe
Published 03/08/2014|00:00
Danny Sutcliffe appears to find a visceral thrill playing hurling not found in any other game
In 2011, after Dublin won their first National Hurling League title since 1939, Anthony Daly suddenly found himself in demand on the business speaking circuit. Where, he wondered drily, were those requests when Dublin were not weaving the same spell? Like the year before when they lost to Antrim and he took that lonely drive west, heading nowhere in particular, literally not sure where he was going.
Oh a fickle business, this hurling. And Dublin hurling, more fickle again. They don’t allow opinion settle on them for very long. If Daly goes, as seems almost certain, he leaves a team which in its various explorations achieved some landmark feats, made historic gains, and yet proved a recurring puzzle even to themselves. After they met a dead end in Thurles last Sunday, Michael Carton was lost for an explanation. It was not a new sensation. The autopsy of the Leinster final was no clearer.
With the progress the team made last year consolidated by a promising start in Wexford Park, the downturn is all the more perplexing. And this time they had a chance to rectify one capitulation, the Leinster final, going in against Tipperary without major pressure or expectation. They usually respond. If
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there has been one streak of consistency in Daly’s Dublin it has been that they make amends. But the battery had gone flat.
At one stage in the second half Liam Rushe won a ball and drove it low down to the right corner-forward position. It went from Rushe to Paul Ryan in a few seconds, a forward’s ball, the kind that is very hard to defend. Ryan controlled it with a good first touch and then, having eschewed the point option, brought the ball back on his stick and bore down on goal. They needed something special; he won a penalty. That was missed but the ball that had created the chance, and presented Ryan with the opening and planted the message in his head to make damn good use of it, was of a standard rare in Dublin’s play. A glimpse of the potential in the team. But just that: a glimpse.
For the most part Dublin ball was neither won with conviction nor handled with any great love. Delieveries to the forwards were not really deliveries to a specific address, more like the sorting office where they were left fight it out among themselves. It came in high and loopy and allowed Tipp men to gather. It allowed Tipp men time to think. It allowed Tipp men time to put out their cigarettes and put away their
newsapers.
Dublin didn’t look like a team enjoying themselves. Contrast that with the 2011 League final or the Leinster final of last year and the evident pleasure of a Dublin hurling team spreading its wings and taking flight, leaving behind the old crippling hesitations. Being afraid of nothing. On the Friday before they beat Galway to win the Leinster championship, Daly said they were “bulling for it.”
They were not bulling for it last Sunday but they can look back on the last six years and see the progress made. The League win, even against a depleted Kilkenny that had 14 men from 10 minutes before half- time. The defeat of Kilkenny, in a replay, for the first time in 71 years in the championship. The first Leinster title since 1961. Two All-Ireland semi-final appearances. But putting two good seasons together eluded them – mostly it was a story of big take-offs and dramatic landings.
In 2012, when they lost to Kilkenny in Portlaoise and went down to Ennis and lost to Clare, Dublin were in a place like now. A crossroads. Making sense of the slippage wasn’t easy but they seemed to identify players whose focus had blurred. Nothing ridiculous, just little signs here and there. For, as Daly noted when citing the contrast in the spikiness in the Waterford challenge in league games in 2009 and 2010, they were in a different place. They did not have to be as good as they were; they had to be better. Back they came, to win a Leinster championship, out of the ruins of a worrying national league semi-final drubbing from Tipperary.
Again, it seemed all or nothing with Dublin; they were very good or very bad and knew no in-between. The going up took so much out of them that they struggled to maintain that level of intensity and appetite – one remedy for that is a steady turnover of players.
In 2011 they brought Conal Keaney back and gained Ryan O’Dwyer. Paul Ryan had settled, having travelled in 2009 and taken time to find his groove on returning the next year. They were regenerated and the results followed.
Danny Sutcliffe has come on since. The Schuttes definitely have the right stuff, too. And the injuries to some of these key players may have taken something essential from the team in 2014. But they needed a few more natural forwards, less of the manufactured kind. They needed another high-octane, physical midfielder. They had a good goalkeeper until he got injured but they found another, Alan Nolan, who is one of the bright spots from their season – he has been outstanding. Another substantial bonus is that they
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managed to preserve their Division 1A status, all the more important now after a disappointing summer and facing the prospect of blooding new players.
There weren’t enough of those fearless young players though you’d like to see arriving to terrify those who were sitting in positions for several years and more. Or if they were, they weren’t getting enough championship time.
If Daly leaves as expected they face a tall challenge in finding a suitable successor. At a deeper level they will also need to examine the structures which provide some of the best young hurlers in the county, only to see them lost to Gaelic football. This was beyond Daly’s control and left him at a competitive disadvantage. It will also turn others off the job.
Successful minor teams, like those which reached an All-Ireland final in 2011 and 2012, are supposed to be breeding grounds for senior teams of the future, not ends in themselves. Instead, even players who fade into huge county football training panels are lost to hurling, where they might be better utilised.
In that climate they can only hope that there are more players coming through the system like Rushe and Sutcliffe who appear to find a visceral thrill playing hurling not found in any other game. Which to them, even in this material world, is enough.
But a challenge now faces the GAA gurus in Parnell Park to find a more effective safeguard so that the incentive to cultivate good hurlers within the best coaching academies remains and isn’t destroyed by the sight of the best players being lost to the game. It is not sustainable otherwise, not if Dublin want to achieve a level of consistency that will see the county seriously challenge for All-Irelands.
There are good people there now in positions of influence who have no truck with old prejudices and cute hoorism. They need to do what they can to ensure that Daly’s legacy is built upon and try to bring it to the next level rather than settle for what they have. They owe him and the players of the last six seasons that. The test is five years from now and where they’ll stand in relation to where they are now. They have clearly advanced on the last five. They must keep advancing.
It is an emotional leavetaking because Daly is a heart-on-sleeve personality and he has built a really close rapport with the group. In a way his presence is so large that you would worry about the void it leaves. But a new approach is the wise and sensible option. It has been a privilege for his players to have had the chance to draw on his tremendous lust for the battlefield, but even the most charismatic voice, and his is of the first rank, becomes overly familiar and the impact wears thin. A manager must accept some of the responsibility for a team’s stagnation. The team itself, in selection and structure, looks tired and there is an impression of trying to fit square pegs into round holes, like Colm Cronin in a confined and specialised role like corner-forward, or indeed Conor McCormack. An over-investment in broad shoulders to the detriment of the lighter forwards who are a defender’s nightmare hasn’t helped and the team looked bereft of attacking imagination.
Which leaves the new man, if there is to be a new man, with a sizeable task. There are players with a lot of mileage and a new manager could conceivably put out a team with several changes next year. The heaviness in their movement was hard to credit for a team so well trained and looked after, the trouble in getting ground ball to hand startling for a team that has achieved the results it has. Which leads you to the impression of a team simply no longer fresh enough to make it happen, the spark gone. It is time to rip it up and start again, top to bottom.
– Independent.ie