Leinster Football Final Preview
Posted: Fri Jul 07, 2006 1:13 pm
Dust down the flares and get your hair a-growin’, the seventies are back! Well okay, maybe not quite, but it’s an easy mistake to make nowadays. Look at some of the biggest gigs in this country over the last and next twelve months – The Eagles, Motorhead, Status Quo, Paul McCartney, Rod Stewart and Bob Dylan to name a few. But while it’s tempting to enter into a little rant about worn out old men assembling for one last pay cheque at extortionate prices, this is the sports section of an Offaly Paper after all, so if we’re going to reminisce about the disco years, lets focus on the topical issue – a Leinster Final between Offaly and Dublin. Much like Status Quo being popular, it’s hard to conceive now, but there once was a time when this was the key battle in Leinster Football. Between 1971 and 1985 these two counties shared all fifteen Leinster Football titles. For the last eight years of that spell, the dominance reached almost absurd proportions - eight years, sixteen Leinster campaigns between both sides and only one defeat to any of the other ten counties in Leinster, that when Dublin fell to Laois in 1981.
Of course this is 21 years later and none of that should really matter – except that in one very real and meaningful way, it does. When Offaly football teams were competing throughout that era, they left a considerable legacy to future generations – that Offaly football teams were a tough match for any team in the country, but more importantly that they were never beaten till the final whistle. Countless Offaly football teams at all grades have taken the field in the last twenty years with a self belief and a confidence based on the spirit of that era, always believing that Offaly belonged on the big stage. Even after the low years of the early and mid 1990’s, when our incredible self belief was matched only by our appalling underachievement, when our big days finally did arrive, in the form of Leinster and National League finals in 1997 and 1998, Offaly weren’t gatecrashers or upstarts to be at that level – we played like it was our natural stage, and got the appropriate results.
In recent years there was a real concern that this legacy was being squandered – successive narrow and unlucky defeats to beatable opposition meant that Offaly were transforming from a competitive team that played hard to the last whistle into a competitive team that played hard but invariably failed to close matters out. Countless draws and narrow defeats were being accumulated, while wins were getting increasingly hard to come by – and that’s why this year has been so encouraging. This year we’ve won all those narrow games, and so all roads lead to Sunday.
However Sunday is another matter. Naturally the standard of opponent has got more difficult as the competition has gone on, but if one were to use a children’s nursery rhyme to illustrate this campaign, the progression has been “one potato, two potato, three potato, eight”. This is a huge jump from the level we’ve been at thus far, and no amount of hype changes that. The cold hard facts are that Dublin’s demolition of Laois has been the single most impressive performance of the football championship this year in any of the four provinces. Granted many teams, Kerry and Mayo in particular, have yet to be tested, but even those counties have more in their lockers, you have to ask – do Offaly?
To take on this current Dublin team, there are a lot of boxes that have to be ticked. Firstly, and most importantly, you have to defend from the full forward line back. These are the cosmopolitans, the flair players, the swagger boys. Bacon and Cabbage style defenders don’t get picked on Dublin teams, these guys are fillet of pork with mint sauce all the way – just as much nutritional value, but a lot more flair. O’Shaughnessy, Cahill, even Cluxton in goals – all footballers. They will play accurate passes out of defence, they will run and support the man in possession and most importantly they will exploit any slack marking – if players are not picked up around midfield, they will find them.
The second key step is to stop their key playmaker – the once-upon-a-time darling of the Hill, Jayo. Jason Sherlock has been much maligned in recent years, but those who write him off as nothing but a flash goalscorer who failed at soccer haven’t seen him play recently. He drops deep, he takes up good positions and his vision and distribution up to thirty metres is nothing short of wonderful. He won’t score 2-2 or the like, but he’ll set up that much and more if he’s let. In Parnell Park in March we stood off him, looking instead to “hold” the centre back position. It was a serious tactical error at the time and one that can’t be repeated. If you don’t want to delegate your centre back to pick him up, someone else has to.
The third and final step to stopping the Dubs is to make sure that the tyres are blown out of the bandwagon at every opportunity. The boys in blue are a confidence team, it’s imperative that they aren’t let develop momentum. With Hill 16 in full flow, the Dubs are one of the best teams in Ireland for winning a game in ten minutes – they can easily get on a roll, put 1-6 on the board and leave you chasing the game for the remainder. That kind of burst can’t be allowed. Needless to say this writer is completely opposed to the idea of tactical fouling. For the sake of Gaelic Football it would be better if Offaly chose not to employ it on Sunday, so effective could it be at stopping the Dubs from gaining any flow. Equally there’s nothing more deflating than waiting for two minutes while a player is treated in the centre of the pitch for one of those serious injuries that can only be cured by the most miraculous of modern inventions – spray. To see such a thing happen after Dublin secure a goal and a point in succession would be very hard on the viewer, even if there are dark forces out there who would suggest that it could be to Offaly’s advantage.
That’s the sad thing about modern football – stop your opponents from playing, and you’ve gone 75% of the way towards winning the game. However having said that, for Offaly to win this game, we need to win a huge amount of breaking ball at midfield to compensate for our lack of fielding, we need to defend like tigers from the full forward line back, and we need our twin terrors up front to both find space and wreak havoc close to goals again. I suspect that Offaly will do reasonably well at the first two, but that our cards are on the table with regard to the third and that the return of Bryan Cullen to the back line will see Dublin reading a lot of our forward deliveries very well and result in the two lads living off scraps. With the character we’ve seen from this team so far this championship I would expect nothing short of a committed and wholehearted display – one that will probably bring us to within three or four points of Dublin, but sadly no closer.
Of course this is 21 years later and none of that should really matter – except that in one very real and meaningful way, it does. When Offaly football teams were competing throughout that era, they left a considerable legacy to future generations – that Offaly football teams were a tough match for any team in the country, but more importantly that they were never beaten till the final whistle. Countless Offaly football teams at all grades have taken the field in the last twenty years with a self belief and a confidence based on the spirit of that era, always believing that Offaly belonged on the big stage. Even after the low years of the early and mid 1990’s, when our incredible self belief was matched only by our appalling underachievement, when our big days finally did arrive, in the form of Leinster and National League finals in 1997 and 1998, Offaly weren’t gatecrashers or upstarts to be at that level – we played like it was our natural stage, and got the appropriate results.
In recent years there was a real concern that this legacy was being squandered – successive narrow and unlucky defeats to beatable opposition meant that Offaly were transforming from a competitive team that played hard to the last whistle into a competitive team that played hard but invariably failed to close matters out. Countless draws and narrow defeats were being accumulated, while wins were getting increasingly hard to come by – and that’s why this year has been so encouraging. This year we’ve won all those narrow games, and so all roads lead to Sunday.
However Sunday is another matter. Naturally the standard of opponent has got more difficult as the competition has gone on, but if one were to use a children’s nursery rhyme to illustrate this campaign, the progression has been “one potato, two potato, three potato, eight”. This is a huge jump from the level we’ve been at thus far, and no amount of hype changes that. The cold hard facts are that Dublin’s demolition of Laois has been the single most impressive performance of the football championship this year in any of the four provinces. Granted many teams, Kerry and Mayo in particular, have yet to be tested, but even those counties have more in their lockers, you have to ask – do Offaly?
To take on this current Dublin team, there are a lot of boxes that have to be ticked. Firstly, and most importantly, you have to defend from the full forward line back. These are the cosmopolitans, the flair players, the swagger boys. Bacon and Cabbage style defenders don’t get picked on Dublin teams, these guys are fillet of pork with mint sauce all the way – just as much nutritional value, but a lot more flair. O’Shaughnessy, Cahill, even Cluxton in goals – all footballers. They will play accurate passes out of defence, they will run and support the man in possession and most importantly they will exploit any slack marking – if players are not picked up around midfield, they will find them.
The second key step is to stop their key playmaker – the once-upon-a-time darling of the Hill, Jayo. Jason Sherlock has been much maligned in recent years, but those who write him off as nothing but a flash goalscorer who failed at soccer haven’t seen him play recently. He drops deep, he takes up good positions and his vision and distribution up to thirty metres is nothing short of wonderful. He won’t score 2-2 or the like, but he’ll set up that much and more if he’s let. In Parnell Park in March we stood off him, looking instead to “hold” the centre back position. It was a serious tactical error at the time and one that can’t be repeated. If you don’t want to delegate your centre back to pick him up, someone else has to.
The third and final step to stopping the Dubs is to make sure that the tyres are blown out of the bandwagon at every opportunity. The boys in blue are a confidence team, it’s imperative that they aren’t let develop momentum. With Hill 16 in full flow, the Dubs are one of the best teams in Ireland for winning a game in ten minutes – they can easily get on a roll, put 1-6 on the board and leave you chasing the game for the remainder. That kind of burst can’t be allowed. Needless to say this writer is completely opposed to the idea of tactical fouling. For the sake of Gaelic Football it would be better if Offaly chose not to employ it on Sunday, so effective could it be at stopping the Dubs from gaining any flow. Equally there’s nothing more deflating than waiting for two minutes while a player is treated in the centre of the pitch for one of those serious injuries that can only be cured by the most miraculous of modern inventions – spray. To see such a thing happen after Dublin secure a goal and a point in succession would be very hard on the viewer, even if there are dark forces out there who would suggest that it could be to Offaly’s advantage.
That’s the sad thing about modern football – stop your opponents from playing, and you’ve gone 75% of the way towards winning the game. However having said that, for Offaly to win this game, we need to win a huge amount of breaking ball at midfield to compensate for our lack of fielding, we need to defend like tigers from the full forward line back, and we need our twin terrors up front to both find space and wreak havoc close to goals again. I suspect that Offaly will do reasonably well at the first two, but that our cards are on the table with regard to the third and that the return of Bryan Cullen to the back line will see Dublin reading a lot of our forward deliveries very well and result in the two lads living off scraps. With the character we’ve seen from this team so far this championship I would expect nothing short of a committed and wholehearted display – one that will probably bring us to within three or four points of Dublin, but sadly no closer.
) I think you may be falling for the Dublin hype, and disregarding our own strengths.
