DUBLIN MAY HAVE cruised through to Sunday’s Allianz Football League final but Denis Bastick knows he and his team-mates will need to raise their game against Kerry.
The two counties will renew their rivalry at Croke Park this weekend with silverware on the line as Jim Gavin’s men look to claim their fourth successive league title.
The Dubs recorded eight wins from as many outings en route to the decider and rarely needed to get out of second gear as they extended their unbeaten streak to 21 games in league and championship.
But Kerry will provide a different proposition at HQ with the Kingdom no doubt keen to avenge last year’s All-Ireland final defeat.
“We never underestimate them, they are a great team,” Bastick said. “They’ve got great players. We don’t think we are better than them at any stage, we know that if we don’t play well we will lose and that’s a guaranteed factor.
“From our point of view, we have confidence from some of our wins and we bring that to the game but we don’t underestimate them at all.
“They were the last team to beat us. They beat us last year down in Kerry on a bad day down there.
“They beat us down there and we beat them earlier on in the year. I think the league can be a bit misguided in that some teams have a different amount of work done at different times.
[image alt="Denis Bastick" src="http://cdn.thejournal.ie/media/2016/04/denis-bastick-5-630x449.jpg" width="630" height="449" title="" class="aligncenter" /end]
“But when you get to the latter stages, to a final, I think everyone’s on a level par.”
Sunday’s clash will be the first league final between these two adversaries since 1987 when Dublin prevailed 1-11 to 0-11.
Indeed, Dublin will go into this encounter as favourites but 35-year-old Bastick acknowledged that the Boys in Blue have yet to really hit their straps this campaign and have even ridden their luck at times.
“If you look at it more clearly,” he says of their unbeaten run. “It sounds fantastic okay, but we went to Longford in January [O'Byrne Cup] and were beaten down there. That was disappointing for us.
“If you look at some of our league games, we beat Monaghan by a late point at Croke Park, Roscommon had a free to level that game too so whilst we are unbeaten, our performances – some of them have not been up to a level that we would expect from ourselves.
“It is a great stat to have, and can that stay going? Who knows, but really it’s just about looking forward to Sunday and trying to get over that. It would be nice to continue it on.
“It’s nice to have won those games but in 2009, you’d have said that you couldn’t foresee that happening because of the position we found ourselves in.
“But that bit of hurt is still there from that. That’s still there. No matter how many times we were to beat Kerry, you still remember those defeats.
“And I’m sure they remember the ones we’ve inflicted on them. So this is a new game now at the weekend.
“It’s a new team. It’s a new game, a new competition. A new event.”
The42 is on Snapchat! Tap the button below on your phone to add!
