What does Jim Gavin take from these matches in Leinster? Kildare were dispatched yesterday by a chastening 19 points.
It did drag down the average win in the current provincial campaign from 27 to 23 but surely it has to be frustrating or concerning that Dublin don’t encounter the full competitive rigours of championship play – the icy feeling of imminent or at least possible defeat – until the second chances are all used up?
“We could have faced defeat today,” he replied, “if we decided not to show up. It’s a matter for ourselves to prepare the best that we can; that’s all we can do. There are no guarantees. If the mindset wasn’t good today, we couldn’t have come away with the result. So we’ll keep going after that.
“There’s a lot of fatigued players in the Dublin dressing-room. Looking at them they’re quite exhausted from their efforts. To see them applying themselves for the full 70 minutes is satisfying.”
Perceptions
So Dublin rumble on, into a 10th
Leinster
final in 11 years. Thanks to the remarkable recovery by Westmeath in the first semi-final, there will be a novel final but perceptions of its outcome won’t vary much with odds of 100/1 on already being circulated.
Gavin disagreed that such presumptions constituted pressure for him and his players.
“No, it’s not mentioned. To get a performance there’s a certain process we need to go through. You saw the end product on the park today. Behind that goes a lot of hard work by the players in the main. They’re a very driven bunch.
“They wear that [favourites] tag very, very lightly. They’re very ambitious and understand that it’s all about the next game. There are no guarantees in this sport and they just have to work hard and put themselves in a position to win games.”
For Kildare manager Jason Ryan it was a version of Groundhog Day – one in which outcomes are repeated but in increasingly extreme fashion. In charge of Wexford, he'd done everything but beat Dublin when they played.
Two years ago, as Kieran McGeeney’s coach he watched as the team took a 16-point trimming. Whatever about putting up a good show and getting that margin down to something more dignified, Ryan must have hoped that the balance of terror wouldn’t actually deteriorate.
“It was a game where we were very aware with the history there has been between Dublin and Kildare over the last number of years that we needed a good first half, we needed a solid foundation, we needed to really execute the basics of the game to the best of our ability and at stages in the second Laois match we felt it happened.
“In the first half we had more attacks inside the Dublin 45 than they had in ours but they made their scoring chances count. We unfortunately didn’t execute the way we needed to, to give us the real belief to drive on.
“There was insufficient contact. That’s a fact. We didn’t get enough contact on Dublin runners and we didn’t get as many blocks down on Dublin players getting shots off.
“That was something that was probably consistent all the way through the first half and certainly for the last 15 minutes of the second half.”
He acknowledged that Dublin had done nothing to surprise Kildare. What arrived had largely been what had been seen coming. Had he not been tempted to go for broke defensively?
“At certain stages during the game we thought we had the bus parked. That’s the reality. I’d say if we had snapshots of the first and second halves there were quite a few Kildare players inside the 45-metre line.”
