After their mauling by Mayo, Dublin's manager expects a big display against Cork tomorrow, writes MALACHY CLERKIN

A SPOOL of sackcloth, a scoop of ashes as the Dubs ready themselves for the last round of what has turned out to be a fairly chastening campaign. Pat Gilroy has said all along that grafting semi-finals onto the league is a bit of a nonsense but you get the sense he’ll be glad of the extra game if his team come out the other side of tomorrow’s trip to Cork. The trimming handed out by Mayo last Saturday night was a fall down an open manhole – they didn’t see it coming and they couldn’t do anything about it. Hence a week of quiet and not so quiet introspection.

“There was fierce honesty about what was going on,” says Gilroy. “We discussed it out. The group has got to that stage where they will be very honest with each other and we’re very honest with them. We know that if we’re only off a slight bit with our work rate we just know we’re not a great team, it’s as simple as that. We pointed to a number of things that we did on the day that just wouldn’t be the norm for us and we know we wouldn’t get away with it against anyone.

“It’s very simple. Our intensity and our work rate against Mayo was shocking. It was as low as it has been in three years and when that happens to us we’re just no good. Our defending starts with our forwards and we almost had zero of that in the first half. We didn’t do a lot of the things that we’d talked about before. There were a lot of lessons there for us because we could have had it a lot closer at half-time if we’d done what we set out to do.”

That Dublin haven’t won a game in Cork in over 30 years is no burden on Gilroy and his side. That they’ve overcome no grander foe than Laois away from home in this campaign weighs a bit heavier alright. Indeed, since the move to Croke Park for Dublin’s home league games last year, they’ve only beaten Monaghan, Galway, Armagh and Laois beyond the confines of Jones’s Road – the first three played pass-the-parcel amongst themselves with the relegation places last year and Laois lie on the bottom of the table this time around.

The sample size is far too small to diagnose chronic travel sickness just yet but lose in Páirc Uí Chaoimh tomorrow and they’ll start to get a name for it.

“It’s certainly easier to motivate yourself to play a game in Croke Park,” concedes Bryan Cullen. “Everyone looks forward to getting to Croke Park as opposed to playing in some of the provincial grounds but I don’t think the crowd really has anything to do with it. It’s only natural that players would look forward to playing in Croke Park over smaller venues.”

For Cullen, last week shone a brutal torch on Dublin’s deficiencies. Not for the first time in the league, indiscipline left them playing without their full team and their energy was sapped as a result. But it was down to more than that as well. Complacency, maybe?

“I suppose as All-Ireland champions you expect to beat everyone,” he says. “Call that complacency if you want.

“I suppose looking at it you would think that we probably went down there expecting to win and waited for it to happen a little bit as opposed to making it happen ourselves. We put the work in on the training pitch, we trained well, we just failed to deliver it on the pitch. It was a surprise.

“We thought the days of conceding 20-something points were firmly behind us.”

Gilroy still quietly maintains that “it won’t be a disaster” if Dublin fail to make it through to the semi-finals. The slightly quixotic team he’s picked for the occasion would appear to bear this out – Michael Darragh Macauley at centre half-forward, Craig Dias at corner-forward, Seán Murray in midfield.

Whatever about the outcome though, it will be a worry for the All Ireland champions if he doesn’t see a proper response tomorrow.

“In one sense you’d prefer [a blip] not to happen at all,” says Gilroy, “but if it’s going to happen this is the time for it. Look at the Kilkenny hurlers last year in the League final against Dublin – they weren’t anywhere near the intensity they were for the rest of the year. If we can get a similar response, we’ll be very happy.”