Seán Moran recalls the last Leinster final between Offaly and Dublin, in 1983, when the complacent All-Ireland champions fell to a young team
The crossroads back then might have been bigger and more identifiable but like all such junctions, this one is most clearly visible through the lens of hindsight. Tomorrow Offaly and Dublin face each other in this year's Bank of Ireland Leinster final. Neither will be out of the All-Ireland race by the time the match is over, although it's safe to suggest the losers won't be in the best of spirits for the final round of the qualifiers.
When the counties last met at this stage, however, things were starker. It was 1983 and Offaly were All-Ireland champions after winning perhaps the most celebrated final in history when spiking Kerry's five-in-a-row sequence in 1982.
It had been a long, hard ascent for the team under the management of Eugene McGee, who took charge of the county for the 1977 season.
He was attracted to the job although he'd never had the ambition to manage an intercounty team. McGee's years with UCD, including the two All-Ireland club titles, gave him an in-depth knowledge of Dublin football, and he is optimistic that Offaly had the raw material and, importantly, a recent history of winning All-Irelands, an asset he believes gives the county the right to be optimistic about the future.
"The county has a population of 60,000 and that's divided between football and hurling. Look at the benches this weekend. You could put a team off the Dublin bench that could get to a Leinster final. Offaly's got nothing like that in reserve.
"Population is a telling factor because bigger panels are required these days. You're allowed five subs and blood subs. Back then you could get away with a panel of about 20; now you need more like 30.
"In the modern game weaker counties are suffering pro rata because some of them would only have jerseys on the bench. But Offaly could win All-Irelands again because they have the tradition of winning them."
Incrementally his team had risen from the obscurity of being a bunch of fading All-Ireland winners - the 1971-1972 back-to-back successes - to reconstruction at provincial and national level.
Dublin appeared to be at the bottom of that cycle. The great side of the 1970s had drifted into retirement, leaving three surviving All-Ireland medallists, Brian Mullins, captain Tommy Drumm and Anton O'Toole.
The balance of the team was made up of graduates from the minor successes of 1979 and 1982, Barney Rock, Ciarán Duff, John O'Leary and Joe McNally, survivors of the less successful era at the tail-end of the 1970s, such as Mick Holden, PJ Buckley, Jim Ronayne and John Caffrey, plus a handful of newcomers, like Pat Canavan, Gerry Hargan, Ray Hazley and Tommy Conroy, brought in by manager Kevin Heffernan.
There was little enough buzz about Dublin for the match, and only 36,912 turned up at Croke Park. Only a year previously Offaly had thrashed them in the provincial final before going on to land that famous All-Ireland.
"We went out with the wrong attitude," says McGee. "The previous year we'd hammered them by nine points and thought we couldn't lose. In all the league matches we played they rarely ever beat us and it went to our heads. We thought we couldn't lose. We had every reason to be confident and didn't apply ourselves and I blame myself for that. We were fairly sure we'd win and Cork had just beaten Kerry the previous week, which opened up the All-Ireland for us.
"I remember being down in Cork for that Munster final. Páidí Ó Sé said in his book that he'd spotted me before the match in my wellingtons - it was an awful day - and thought at the time that it was a bad omen."
So it proved, but the result wasn't a great omen for Offaly either. Barney Rock was in the middle of a phenomenal year, during which his scores would be instrumental in Dublin's All-Ireland success, and he remembers that the shock in Munster galvanised his team-mates as well.
"The previous week Cork had beaten Kerry, which gave us a lift and probably took Offaly's mind off the Leinster final a bit."
Although he was still in his early 20s, Dublin goalkeeper John O'Leary was by now a regular on the team. Whereas he says there were no particularly high hopes at the start of the season, there were straws in the wind.
"We had beaten Kerry down in Tralee in that year's League (the 1982-1983 season, a fixture that remains Dublin's last victory down in Kerry). That was a very young side just coming through and for them it was a big signal to win a match like that. After that there was something about us. The year was one big adventure."
The Championship began with a two-match saga against Meath, being managed for the first time by Seán Boylan, which Dublin were fortunate to survive. A lacklustre win over Louth qualified the team for the final. O'Leary remembers one factor in particular he felt acted as encouragement, and for the Leinster final they needed no special motivation.
"We looked on it as revenge for the previous year when we hadn't played very well. We weren't around long enough to start thinking about All-Irelands.
"Most of us hadn't won a Leinster and it was all very new. We were thinking about putting one over the team that had beaten us. The fact that they were All-Ireland champions added spice to it but wasn't the main motivation."
McGee says he has discovered a further influence on proceedings that afternoon, also related to the 1982 final.
"Another factor, which I only found out recently, was that one of our players - who shall remain nameless - made a smart-aleck comment to Heffernan on the way off the pitch in '82. It was something along the lines of 'surprised you couldn't give us more of a game'. Now the one man in the world you don't make smart-aleck comments to is Heffernan. Apparently he was bulling."
Suitably stirred, Heffernan devised the tactical coup of the afternoon.
"We played quite well," says O'Leary, "and that was the first time we used John Caffrey (brother of current Dublin manager Paul) as a third midfielder coming out deep from corner forward, and that caused problems for Offaly."
Dublin were in control from an early stage and two first-half goals set the scene for a five-point victory, 2-13 to 1-11. Rock was centrally involved in the first.
"I remember getting a ball from Gerry Hargan at the Hill end. He knocked it long and I caught it in front of Liam Currams, made a bit of ground and sent the ball in on top of Joe McNally. He flicked it to Anton O'Toole for the goal. It was a big boost coming so early in the game and set us up nicely."
Near the end Offaly's Mick Fitzgerald was sent off after an altercation with Duff, which caused scuffles on the sideline, but the dismissal didn't influence the outcome.
Offaly never recovered. Theirs had been a slow, steady ascent, creeping closer each year. In 1979 it took an escape act that would have shamed Houdini for Dublin to win. When the breakthrough came a year later it was still a close-run thing, as Dublin led by 1-5 to 0-2 at half-time, and McGee recalls having to make 12 switches before the second half started.
That peak scaled, the county went on to land the All-Ireland after losing a semi-final and final to Kerry in successive years.
"The so called step-by-step progress," says McGee. "It took six years, each an extra step along the way. It was a great way to do it but nowadays you'd never be given the time and fellas wouldn't wait around that long to win something."
In 1984 after they had lost to Dublin again, and even more emphatically, McGee stepped down, regretting he hadn't done so earlier.
"There was the usual romanticism: 'We'll stay one more year and get it right.' But the graph was downward and I'm sorry I didn't do a Pat O'Neill (Dublin's All-Ireland-winning manager in 1995) and walk away after winning.
"My personal ambition to win a second All-Ireland was never the same as Joe Kernan's. I was perfectly happy to win one."
Dublin had to be happy with one as well. After winning the title with such a young team, the players must have expected there would be further silverware to come. Instead they ran into Kerry's lengthy lap of honour between 1984 and 1986, and only O'Leary would still be around when the Sam Maguire next stayed in the capital, in 1995.
"Of course we would have thought that," says Rock about the 1983 team's expectations. "Everyone did. But when we came up against Kerry in those finals they were just the better team. That's the way these things go."
