Dublin victory rooted in history

THE last time Dublin won the National Hurling League, ‘Hitler was heading for Poland and Paddy for Holyhead.’1939.
Ciara asked me had I been at the final. No, I don’t remember that one now, I have to say. I do remember lots of other days, though. Getting beaten by Kildare in the Leinster Championship first round in Aughrim the same year Dublin drew with the Cats in Croke Park. The ‘Battle of Athleague’ when I think we got beaten by Roscommon but the result was secondary to what in reality was more like a battle scene out of Braveheart. Oh, and all the many humiliating hidings over the years and not always at the hands of teams now considered to be of the elite.
To put the victory over the Cats into perspective, Dublin have beaten Kilkenny at senior level on just four occasions in my lifetime. Two of those occasions were this year.
The roots of this victory, however, do not lie in the past. They are firmly in the solid soil of Dublin under-age hurling. Indeed, some of the younger lads on this team have beaten the Cats as often as they have been on the other end. That explains their lack of fear whereas in the past even decent Dublin sides were probably beaten in their heads before they left the dressing room to face the black and amber.
Tradition is often cited as a factor in Gaelic games and there is something to that. But every county has a tradition of some sort and while hurling had disappeared in Dublin by the time the GAA was founded, and even though most of those who played in the early years were non-Dubs, the game has strong local roots.
The Dublin tradition in terms of native teams based on Dublin clubs goes back to the 1940s and its high point until now was the narrow defeat of a Dublin team in the 1961 All-Ireland Final, when all but one of the 15 players were Dubs.
So you can create your own ‘tradition’ and that has been underlined in recent years by Tyrone, Armagh and Derry in football, and Offaly – and arguably Galway and Clare too in hurling given the long gap between Galway and Clare’s wins in 1923 and 1914.
Dublin are attempting to do what Galway and Clare did from a similar background of generally being considered to be one of the maybe top ten hurling counties but dismissed out of hand when it came to winning anything of significance.
It is no coincidence then that the public face of the Dublin renaissance is Anthony Daly. He has not only brought with him his experience as a player and as a manager at the top level but also an instinctive empathy with the scale of the mountain to be climbed. He has also clearly reinforced the feeling that thinking oneself as inferior to anyone else means that you are wasting your time.
He has also inculcated a ruthlessness of a type that was clearly lacking last year when Dublin exited the championship at the hands of Antrim. The lesson from that was that if you do not play with the same intensity and aggression for the whole 70-odd minutes against whoever happens to be the opposition then you are going to pay the price.
Daly almost walked after that and only recommitted himself on the understanding that nothing less than the obsessional levels of commitment and aggression that had been the hallmark of Clare in their pomp would be acceptable. He has gotten that and last year’s defeat may well turn out to have been the decisive point at which Dublin turned from being a handy bunch of ‘nice hurlers’ into something approaching what Clare became in the mid-1990s.

While a lot of the comment on the final has focused on the actions of a number of Kilkenny players, what is more significant is what led to those actions.
In simple terms, Dublin did to the Cats what the Cats have been doing to other teams for the last decade. They outmuscled them, out fought them and didn’t give them any room. From a Kilkenny perspective, Dubs are not supposed to play that way, and it understandably led to some frustration.
None of Kilkenny’s impetuousness constitutes a hanging offence and I hope that the Star Chamber that is the CCCC does not react in an over-the-top manner. Dalton was certainly lucky not to walk but in fairness, and I am not excusing his over-reaction, it was retaliation. The most significant thing about it is that Kilkenny players would rarely have lashed out like that in the past. Dublin should look on it as a sort of back handed tribute perhaps!
So where to next for the Dubs?
They play Offaly in the Leinster quarter-final on May 29th and that will be a huge game. Offaly hurlers do not do inferiority complexes. It is not in their DNA and they were arguably unlucky not to have claimed a major scalp last year against Galway in the drawn game.
If Dublin turn up with anything less than their ‘A Game’ they will be facing the qualifiers. Daly will not let them rest on their laurels and he will also be aware that Dublin are arguably the closest team in the country to full championship pace at the moment. That will not be the case over the rest of the summer as the rest catch up.
The real tests, hopefully, will come in July and August when they face one of the elite counties, including perhaps the Cats again.
Now that would be something worth seeing!