“Every defender is there to defend,” says Philly McMahon, already anticipating the next question about his exact role in the Dublin football team.

Because while McMahon’s primary role is clearly to defend the Dublin goal, he has become increasingly capable of playing a secondary role closer to their opponents’ goal. He won’t overtake Bernard Brogan or Diarmuid Connolly on the score sheet, but he is well capable of putting the ball over the bar.

Indeed McMahon was the first Dublin player to score in their Leinster final win over Westmeath, slicing the posts after just three minutes.

He scored a point against Kildare in the semi-final, which could just as easily have been a goal (he did actually set up Dean Rock for a goal), and his shooting ability was also displayed against Donegal in last year’s All-Ireland semi-final, when he hit a beautiful long-range point for Dublin.

“It’s not the initial goal, that you go out with in your mind, that you want to get up the pitch and score,” says McMahon, speaking ahead of Dublin’s return to Croke Park this Sunday for their All-Ireland quarter-final against Fermanagh.

“I just try to keep my man off the ball, keep him scoreless. That’s the big thing for me, rather than getting a point. So you just do your job, and if you can give the forwards a hand, get up and support them, be an addition, then definitely, you do enjoy it. But if we enjoyed getting up into the forwards and scoring points, we’d probably be in the forwards.”

Blanket defence

McMahon still considers the art of defending in modern football as “man-on-man”, and yet one of the reasons he’s been able to move into a scoring position is because more teams are adopting the blanket defence when facing Dublin.

“That does allow you to get up the pitch a little bit, when your man is dropping back into his own defence. But you still go out and mark your man. It’s an individual battle.”

While James McCarthy and Jack McCaffrey also scored against Westmeath, McMahon stresses that their primary role will always be to stop the opposition.

“I think the great thing about Dublin over the last couple of years is that we have gone man-on-man, and we’ve learned to be a good defenders. We haven’t had the protection of having a mass defence, or a hybrid defence. So we’ve really worked on being defenders. And that’s been a strong attribute in the Dublin defence.

Best of both worlds

“And when we have the opportunity for other players to get back, and support, we have that now as well. We’ve got the best of both worlds now, I suppose.”

Still, the concern remains: was Dublin’s defence properly tested in the Leinster championship? McMahon, as anticipated, can only address that from Dublin’s perspective. Westmeath hardly shook their defensive foundations, scoring a mere 0-6, but that doesn’t mean Dublin didn’t come away with something to work on.

“A lot of people say Leinster is not good preparation, but they don’t know. And they’re generally not players. Because the preparation is really hard. You’re going in, you’re competing hard, and your standards have to be 100 per cent, all the time.

“That’s the difference between good players and very good players.”

Indeed McMahon believes that Dublin being undone by Donegal in last year’s All-Ireland semi-final had nothing to do with them being ill-prepared. He believes Donegal would probably have beaten them no matter what stage of the summer it was.

“If you think of it this way, if Donegal had played us in Leinster, they still would have beaten us. We just got caught on the hop, I suppose. So there were a couple of things going into this season that we needed to work on and hopefully now we’ll get a chance to show that we’ve done that.

Polish

“And even from the Westmeath game. Even though everybody looks at the scoreline, we look at what we might improve on. And if we can polish that performance off going into the next game, it will be a good thing.”

And, while most people anticipated Dublin’s next game would be Cork, McMahon also insists that has had little impact on Dublin’s preparations.

“I think the only thing that changes is we look at our mistakes and we try to work on them in training. Apart from that, everything is the same. We just look at the mistakes we made, and hope to improve on them for the quarter-final. That’s as much as you can think ahead to.”