After Dublin’s new-look side spluttered past Wexford, the question on everyone’s lips was whether Pat Gilroy would persist with the same line up – insofar as injury and suspension would allow – or revert to the old guard that had ultimately helped Dublin see off the Wexford challenge.
The general consensus was that Gilroy would not easily dispense with the system he had honed during the latter part of the league. Rome wasn’t built in a day after all. When the Dublin side for yesterday’s clash with Meath was finally named on Friday, it certainly caused a few raised eyebrows.
Gilroy sought to make Dublin a tighter, doughtier outfit and, to be fair, it needed doing
Bryan Cullen was drafted back in at centre-back, but with Cian O’Sullivan out, Cullen would have been seen as a safe pair of hands. The big talking point was the absence of captain David Henry, not only from the centre-forward berth, but from the starting fifteen entirely.
Henry’s deployment on the ‘forty’ was seen as the Gilroy stamp on this side. Dublin, over the years, have been great to watch – from a neutral point of view at least – in that they would score a lot, but also concede a lot. The 2006 All-Ireland semi-final against Mayo was the greatest example of this kind of ‘you attack, we attack’ football. Great for neutrals, not so great for Dublin fans.
Gilroy sought to make Dublin a tighter, doughtier outfit and, to be fair, it needed doing. If success came at the expense of entertainment then so be it. Henry, one of their better defenders since his arrival on the inter-county scene, was shifted into the forwards, but was playing a more deep-lying role, in the same vein as someone like Armagh’s  John McEntee, who spent long periods of the game in and around his half-backs even though he had number 11 on his back.
The Henry experiment worked well enough when tried during the league, but not so well in the Wexford game. So, do you persist with something you believe in, or go back to what you – and the players – know, in an effort to establish a more reliable level of performance?
The system Dublin had been working so hard to implement had been discarded with Gilroy’s muddled selection
On the evidence of yesterday, Dublin fell between stools, and Gilroy must take a large share of the criticism for this. They were, not to put too fine a point on it, all over the place. One stats man told me after the game that this was the first time Dublin had conceded five goals in a championship match since the famous All-Ireland Final of 1978, and also their heaviest ever defeat to Meath.
Coincidence? Hardly. Gilroy was at a loss after the game to explain some of the defending from his side, especially the way in which his full-back line was exposed, but surely a lot of this boils down to confusion among the players as to their roles and the roles of those around them.
Alan Brogan wasn’t picked at centre-forward to play as an extra defender as Henry had been, so it’s not hard to see some of the reasons why Dublin’s defence was more at sea than they’ve been in recent years. Cullen played the game he has always played, and bombed forward whenever he could. The system Dublin had been working so hard to implement had been discarded with Gilroy’s muddled selection, and it appeared this confusion seeped through to the players.
Aside from the supposed new system, several of Dublin’s backs were struggling with their direct opponents, none more so than Philip McMahon who was roundly beaten to almost every ball by Stephen Bray. It was baffling to see McMahon and his fellow defenders struggling while Henry kicked his heels on the bench. Henry’s introduction – into the forwards – with ten minutes remaining made little or no sense.
“What we did in the second half was crazy,” Gilroy said after the game. Why these errors happened, and happened so frequently, is a question the Dublin management will have to ask in the coming days because another performance like that will surely place the St. Vincents man’s job in serious jeopardy.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, but Gilroy’s chances of building his own empire took a serious dent at headquarters yesterday.
– David Sheehan
