Darragh Ó Sé: Dublin for Sam? They’ll be doing well to win Leinster

For years, we’ve been used to not taking this early part of the championship all that seriously. You know the games are happening, you know it means a good bit to the teams involved. But with the exception of a few of the matches in Ulster, it’s always been hard to get too excited.

It’s a small bit different this year, mainly because Leinster is interesting for the first time in ages. When people talked about Dublin coming back to the pack, nobody expected that to mean the Leinster pack. We all assumed they would drift back to the other All-Ireland contenders but that would be as bad as it got for them. Nobody predicted this.

Nobody saw it getting to a point where you could sit here at the start of the championship and say that realistically, Dublin have only one trophy to play for. If they aren’t standing on the Hogan Stand steps next month as Leinster champions, they won’t be standing there at all. They are eighth in the betting for Sam Maguire, behind the likes of Derry and Meath. That’s not All-Ireland-winning company.

So no matter what way you look at it, the Leinster Championship is a big deal for Dublin over the coming month. They can’t be thinking about getting back to the top of the Sam Maguire tier if they’re not able to win their own province. They have Wicklow this weekend and then probably Louth a fortnight later and most likely Meath a fortnight after that. In years gone by, we wouldn’t have given those games a second thought. Different story now.

Most people look at the Dublin panel now and all they can see are the players who aren’t there anymore. And if you got a straight answer from the likes of Brian Fenton and Paul Mannion, they might see the same. Fenton is 33 and Mannion is 32. They could still make a difference to Dublin if they thought there was a difference worth making.

But here’s the thing – players know the score. You can cod some of them some of the time but not all of them all of the time. And plenty of them, you can’t cod at all. They’ve been around long enough to know what they have in their dressingroom. And, more importantly, what they don’t have. Whatever that means to you at the start of your career, it’s a crucial factor when it comes to making up your mind about the end.

Go back to when Dublin were hammering everyone in the early parts of the championship – and a fair bit of the back end of it too. The rest of us around the country looked at their team and their panel and could see no chink of light. You’d be running your finger through the subs list and counting the number of fellas who’d be first choice in your own county. Remember Bernard Brogan fighting to make the matchday 26 in his last year? Only Dublin had that sort of luxury.

We all thought there’d be a supply line coming up behind to keep the stocks high. It only stood to reason. The Dubs were flying high, they were in All-Ireland finals every year, heroes to a whole new generation of kids coming through the system. Surely to God, with all the numbers playing football in Dublin, it would just be a case of replacing old jigsaw pieces with new ones?

But it hasn’t worked out that way. The fall-off in quality has been obvious for everyone to see. The Dubs still have a handful of very good players but the newer players haven’t established themselves and the older ones are having to do far too much to bail them out.

[ Brian Fenton confirms retirement after 10 years at the top with DublinOpens in new window ]

It’s a killer when so much experience and talent leaves a dressingroom in a short space of time. The likes of Con O’Callaghan and Ciarán Kilkenny are still there but they’re like actors in a bad sequel now. You can still rely on them to give you a good line every now and then, but the machine around them isn’t running as smoothly.

They were used to Fenton delivering a lovely weighted pass to their chest or into their run. It happened every time without fail. Now, let’s say three out of every five balls are on the money. That’s still good but it means 40 per cent of the time, they’re having to adjust their run or wait that half-second longer or reach back and change direction. It all adds up.

The Dublin dressingroom just isn’t what it was. Simple as that. Ger Brennan might be the best manager Dublin have ever had but until he convinces the best players in Dublin that he has a dressingroom capable of winning an All-Ireland, he won’t have a dressingroom capable of winning an All-Ireland. He knows it, Fenton and the boys know it and now, most worryingly of all for the Dubs, the other teams in Leinster know it.

Louth are Leinster champions. Kildare don’t seem to be going well but they’ve beaten the Dubs countless times at underage level so they know there’s not much to fear. Most of all, Meath are gunning for the Dubs now, having already beaten them once last summer.

Robbie Brennan looks like he is getting a serious tune out of the Meath players. They’re playing with freedom, they’re tough and hardy in the great Meath tradition and they have a few forwards who can shoot the lights out.

That’s what it comes down to in the end. Players are the thing. All winter I heard fellas talking about the things that went into Kerry winning Sam Maguire, be it the set-up or the new rules or whatever else. But it helped that we had David Clifford and Seán O’Shea and Paudie Clifford and Joe O’Connor and Gavin White and Brian Ó Beaglaoich. You can do a lot when you look around the dressing room and see fellas like that ready to go.

Dublin don’t have those players any more. Or not enough of them, anyway. For the first time in decades, that makes it a Leinster championship worth watching.

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