GAELIC GAMES NEWS:AT SOME point in Dublin's two opening championship matches Niall Corkery must have wondered why he didn't stick with the rugby.
Rattled by Wexford, ripped apart by Meath, it appeared as if Dublin’s summer would be over before the end of June.
Corkery was one of several newcomers to the Dublin panel this season. He only made his first senior start in the concluding league game, where Dublin comfortably beat Tyrone, and Corkery scored a fairly sensational first-half goal. After that, Dublin’s form went rapidly downhill, and the fear was Corkery might have been one of those players introduced before his time.
Gradually, Dublin have regained some momentum – with qualifier wins over Tipperary and Armagh, to set up this Saturday’s fourth-round meeting with beaten (or rather robbed) Leinster finalists, Louth. If they come through that, Dublin are back in an All-Ireland quarter-final, possibly better primed than recent years to progress even further.
It will also help justify Corkery’s decision to abandon his rugby career in favour of Gaelic football, not that he really would have had it any other way. But back in 2002, he was on the Blackrock Senior Cup team that narrowly lost to St Mary’s in the Leinster Schools semi-final, where a certain Johnny Sexton inspired the opposition to victory. Also on the field that day was Blackrock team-mate Cillian Willis, who now plays for Ulster.
“Yeah, I would have been a rugby player first,” says Corkery. “I played flanker with the Senior Cup team, and then was number eight with the Blackrock club, playing with the under-20s. I only took up Gaelic football when I was about 16, for the summer, to keep ticking over during the off-season in rugby when we were off from school.
“Kilmacud Crokes was the local club, so I joined that. Conor Deegan, the Down player, was taking under-16 sessions, and I was just very impressed with him, the sport and the way he treated it. I took a bit of a sabbatical from that, for six months or so, but when I left school I just loved Crokes, the circle of friends there, and so just kept playing.”
Eventually, he dropped the rugby: “It would be very difficult to keep the two going. I can’t imagine how someone could do it. You’d want to be very talented and to have the two coaches co-operating to make it work.”
What initially helped justify that decision was Crokes winning the 2009 All-Ireland club football title, with Corkery one of the standout forwards. But it was only earlier this year, following UCD’s exit from the Sigerson Cup, that he was called into the Dublin panel.
Inevitably it was going to take some time for Corkery and the other newcomers to find their feet, and last Saturday’s three-point win over Armagh was the first indication of them doing exactly that – with Michael Dara MacAuley, Philip McMahon and Michael Fitzsimons also delivering more accomplished displays.
“It was something close to what we’re trying to do, in patches,” says Corkery. “Consistency is what we’re looking at now. I thought we worked pretty hard and got a lot of turnovers in the top third of the pitch. It’s a different team we’re playing against now in Louth, so we’ll have to change a few things.
“But players like myself would be more known for being grafters rather than blinding talents, and I think this team is built on work-rate. And I think the qualifiers anyway mightn’t have been the worst thing to happen to us. As an outsider for the last few years, Dublin have won Leinster easily enough and then taken a hammering at any stage beyond that. So hopefully now we’ll get out of that rut and get into an All-Ireland semi-final, and final.”
Louth will present a different challenge again, having played so well in the Leinster final, only to be denied by poor refereeing. Their chances may well rest on how well they respond to that cruel blow.
“We know exactly what’s required of us,” he adds. “Louth are the best team in Leinster this year. But just the same as we weren’t going into the Armagh game thinking ‘this is Armagh, they’ve won All-Irelands in the past few years, we don’t stand a chance,’ we’re also not going into this game thinking ‘this is Louth, Dublin traditionally beat them so we’ll be fine’.
“This year you’ve seen teams breaking from the mould. The would-be favourites from the last few years are crashing out to supposedly lesser teams.
“So we’re not taking anything like that. We’re just looking at Louth’s performances this year which is very good and they’ll be the best team we’ve faced this year.”
