Tom Humphriessays Dublin are now at the same juncture they were at in those heady days of 1995
Strange times for Dublin football and times freighted with certain ironies and symmetries which won't have escaped seasoned watchers. It is 12 years now since 1995 and the last time a Dublin team won or even appeared in an All-Ireland final. All teams have their own character but of Dublin teams through the ages that winning side was the group which the current unit most resembles in terms of its stubborn, blue-collar, season-in, season-out determination to overcome their own weaknesses. In 1995 they ironed out enough wrinkles and they stood at football's highest podium resplendent for just an instant.
When Dublin played Meath in the Leinster final of 1995, Paul Clarke, a selector on the Dublin sidelines today, commented afterwards that the 10-point defeat inflicted on Dublin's stoic neighbours felt like a statement. Dublin were putting Meath away for a while. And of course the very next summer, famously with Paul Clarke standing on Hill 16, a young Meath team came back and put Dublin away by two points in the Leinster final. They went on to win the All-Ireland that year and won another before the century was out. They evicted Dublin from the championship in three of the next four years. Dublin haven't had a busy September since.
Back in 1995, too, Dublin had finally not just overcome their own frailties but had punctured the sudden ascendancy of Ulster teams. In 1992 when Dublin had escaped from Leinster they had managed to undo themselves by their own hubris.
Dublin had never been beaten in championship football by an Ulster team before then but that Dublin team lost the All-Ireland final to Donegal. The following summer ended when Johnny McGurk's memorable point ushered Derry into the All-Ireland final. Then in 1994 Dublin lost another final, this one to Down.
By September 1995 there were no guarantees of anything anymore, no certainties left. When Dublin faced Tyrone they had the same old faces creased by the same old anxieties but they had the tipping-point energy of Jason Sherlock. They faced the possibility of disbandment and humiliation having failed for four years in a row. When the music stopped they were a point ahead against Tyrone.
In 1995 it had been 12 years since Dublin's previous All-Ireland in 1983 and much had changed in those dozen seasons. Kevin Heffernan's rubric that no Dublin team should ever lose to a Cork team because Cork's arrogance would always unhinge them had been succinctly proven in the semi-final replay of 1983. And the final, the '12 apostles' business, had been another demonstration of the possibilities available to any manager who filled sky-blue jerseys with confident men.
In those dozen years between 1983 and 1995 Dublin had managed to let the Meath genie out of the bottle, had contrived to lose an All-Ireland semi-final to Cork in 1989 when southern cutery prevailed for the first time ever (a seven-point lead thrown away, two dumb penalties conceded, Keith Barr suckered into a sending-off offence by Dinny Allen) and they had lost huge games to a succession of Ulster counties. The landscape had changed. But Dublin won the All-Ireland and everybody said that this outcome was good for the game nationally and locally.
Ostensibly Dublin are now at almost precisely the same juncture they were at in 1995. A dozen years since their last All-Ireland win the landscape has continued to change, only even more dramatically. There is no county in Ireland of whom it could be said by a Dublin manager in the privacy of a dressingroom that they had no right to ever beat a Dublin team. Kildare, Meath, Laois, Westmeath, Armagh,Tyrone, Mayo and Kerry have all had their way with Dublin in this nascent century.
Underage success has become a trickle despite a progressive development-squad system, and it would be easier to estimate the number of grains of sand on a beach than to establish the precise lead Dublin require in a game before they cease to be vulnerable.
And yet, to their pleasure and sometimes to their irritation, Dublin have found that regardless of success or failure there is zero elasticity of demand when it comes to the market. Croke Park will be filled for every championship game of Dublin's summer and it will be filled on a winter's night when the GAA want to turn on the lights for the first time. It will be filled this afternoon against Derry.
In 1983, when Dublin played Meath in the first round of a championship which would end in an All-Ireland, there were just 24,833 people in the house. Dublin played in the next three All-Ireland finals but the Leinster final of 1986 drew fewer than 44,000 people.
This afternoon, even if you ignored fire regulations, you couldn't shoehorn in everybody who wants to see Dublin play in Croker. You could switch the game to Parnell Park, though, and if you precluded all those who would have to ask directions to get there the attendance would be below capacity.
Dublin are an event and a stand-alone phenomenon. Those are tricky things to be. In Kerry and in Kilkenny, the brand-leading counties in football and hurling, the local cognoscenti view their county teams' fixture lists and team selections with the cool disdain of wine snobs. In Dublin the hard core of local GAA expertise is drowned out by the bellowing cacophony of the fine-day-big-match-no-Man-U-on-the-box-anyway brigade. Adulation comes easier than success.
Dublin are both the engineers of this phenomenon and the victims of it. The theatrics of the big day in Croke Park have been shamelessly milked and jacked up, from the hammy and slightly embarrassing "walk to the Hill" business (recently trimmed to a "jog to the footballs placed in front of the Hill" routine) to the "all stewards, gardaí and Pillar Caffrey's young son to their end-of-match positions" announcements to the flashy goal celebrations and the slightly unsavoury triumphalism which greeted the putting away of a moderate Laois team in the Leinster final.
Dublin have fetishised their own routine and existence. They have moved almost into a different and unexplored stratosphere of GAA life in that the currency of celebrity is bestowed on them without either media engagement or the attainment of All-Ireland success.
In that they face challenges unique to any team and derive advantages greater than anybody else. If a Dublin player is found intoxicated on the road by gardaí he can be sure his misadventure will be instant tabloid fodder. If Dublin players get involved in the sort of skirmishes which wouldn't raise eyebrows if they occurred over the last cream bun at a church fair the incident will become the Battle of Wherever and be lodged in folklore as the most analysed shemozzle in the entire history of shemozzling. And if a Dublin player loses the run of himself and gets a bit silly with the triumphalism, there are so many people on the pulpit the next day that the media church looks like the final moments of the Band Aid concert.
It has been 12 years since Dublin's last All-Ireland. The gusher of optimism that 1995 victory generated in a city which deemed itself in dire need of a win to parch its thirst vanished quickly.
There were those who warned that for the GAA in Dublin to be sustainable in the era of Sky Sports and PlayStation it could never be that long again before Dublin won an All-Ireland.
That 12-year gap from 1983 to 1995 had included eight Leinster titles (including the All-Ireland-winning years). Since 1995 the provincial baubles have totalled half that number in a less competitive environment.
And yet there is no sense of crisis or impending doom. The county board has already happily discussed an extension of the contract for Caffrey, the city's GAA clubs feed off the events of the summer, and even if the county championship has fewer quality teams and decent games than it should have, there is nobody screaming that the emperor has no clothes.
Today Dublin face Derry. Twenty-four hours later Kerry play Monaghan. The form book and the turf accountants suggest that 30 years after the epic 1977 semi-final between Dublin and Kerry both counties should be reprising that game in a fortnight's time, making this the second year no Ulster team has reached the last four.
That storied semi-final of 1977 was the high point, the rubber game of a rivalry between the two most charismatic teams in GAA history, two teams managed by the men deemed responsible for the birth of the modern "cult of the manager". You could have fitted another 20,000 people into Croke Park that day, though.
If Dublin play Kerry in two weeks' time, or even if they play a Monaghan team the faces of which most southern fans couldn't pick out of a police line-up, Croke Park will be brimming, the demand for the appearances of players in shops and billboards will continue to flow, the phones will keep on ringing, the exposure will be ceaseless.
And if Dublin should lose, the circus will begin again next spring.
Dublin are possibly the hardest-working team of recent vintage, and that labour is recorded in the muscular power with which they will go about their business today. They boast a nucleus of players any county would give tenure to. What happens today and for the rest of the summer matters but not in the seismic way it used to matter.
Dublin lost to Mayo in last year's semi-final, and whatever your view of the quality of the game or the reasons for Dublin's breakdown that afternoon, it was a catastrophe. But memories are short and the big top was filled again this year. We wondered in the past could the GAA in Dublin survive the advent of television. Then we wondered if it could survive the arrival of Sky Sports.
Now, oddly, the celebrity culture of the Big Brother era sustains the game and enhances the product regardless of what happens between the white lines.
As at that moment of transition back in 1995 when Dublin briefly reigned, it seems Meath might have the momentum to be in pole position, if not this year then certainly next, to take maximum advantage of the new era.
In Dublin though does it matter? In the Dublin dressing-room, for all the endorsement deals and appearance gigs which make a small bonfire of vanities, it matters deeply. Outside, it is fiesta time every time Dublin play.
The shirts sell in their thousands to people who will never break sweat in them, tickets for Croke Park spark a latter-day Klondyke every time they become available. The Dubs are pioneers in a strange land and Dublin football has become three castles in the air.
Of all the challenges left to the teams remaining in the championship, surviving in that environment and staying focused in it is perhaps the toughest of all.
