Where Dublin and Kerry went last Saturday night in Croke Park, they went before in 2018 with the boot on the other foot. A national league game between the reigning All-Ireland champions and a fallen power in deep transition played out before a quarter-full stadium.
The champions came half-cocked with personnel, fully loaded with intent. They led by three at half-time, put the result beyond reach in a commanding third quarter, and when it was all over, Kerry were plunged deep in the relegation mire.
Sound familiar?
Ciarán Kilkenny and Niall Scully bagged the goals in a 2-17 to 0-11 win that would have been filed as routine but, allegedly, Dublin and Kerry do not do routine. After Saturday evening, we really should think about that again.
Back then, Dublin’s win had an obvious hook: Gavin had made a point of schooling a youthful Kerry team sprinkled with wide-eyed innocents who had graduated from their serial All-Ireland minor-winning teams, headlined by David Clifford and Seanie O’Shea.
There may have been a grain of truth in that, but given it was their 11th win on the bounce and they were at the halfway point in a six-in-a-row All-Ireland run, when it came to putting manners on teams, Gavin and Dublin were not in the habit of specifically screening who they admitted into their university of etiquette.
Still, given that Scully, Kilkenny, Clifford and O’Shea – among others – were on the same patch of grass last weekend, you wonder if for a brief second they contemplated that Trading Places is a morality tale easily exported from Wall Street to Jones’ Road.
Most likely not because the truth is, far from trading places, these days they inhabit different planets.
Tony Brosnan's goal helped Kerry to victory. Nick Elliott / INPHO
Nick Elliott / INPHO / INPHO
There would be a comfort for Dublin if Kerry had drawn some kind of satisfaction other than the points they bagged at the weekend, but that is unlikely.
If Kerry were an emerging team in 2018, Dublin, in terms of the short to mid-term, are fast approaching becoming an irrelevant one as frontline contenders.
In a shortlist of teams headed by Donegal, Armagh, Galway, Mayo, Tyrone and Derry, who Jack O’Connor will ink in as those primed to wreck his ambitions of winning back-to back for the first time, it is likely that Dublin are scratched down a second page, which is also likely to be reflected in their league status inside the next month.
And even if it was his intention to sow more doubt in a place where certainty does not exist, his team’s performance fell well shy on that front. Dirty diesel? If Kerry were a second-hand car, they would have spent most of this spring in an NCT car park near you, failing retest after retest for pollutant emissions, which goes some way to explaining their final-quarter fade-outs that have been a recurring feature this spring.
But when it matters they will motor, more than can be said for Dublin, who too will get better as the season progresses, but their improvement will be relative and limited.
Ger Brennan was disappointed with his side's shooting efficiency. Nick Elliott / INPHO
Nick Elliott / INPHO / INPHO
In short, while O’Connor is searching for depth, Ger Brennan is just searching.
From the former’s perspective, it is all going swimmingly, with Armin Heinrich, Keith Evans and Cillian Trant all having the potential to, if not start come the summer, certainly deepen options from the bench.
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For Brennan, though, his trawl for talent has a feel of desperation about it. Including the O’Byrne Cup, he has given game time to 54 players over six games, which in effect is three and a half teams.
That level of experimentation feels more like a cattle call than a transition, but given that he has inherited a job which demanded nothing less than a complete rebuild that should not surprise.
But it is not so much Brennan’s search for talent that jars, as his search to give his team an identity.
There was some encouragement at the weekend, at least defensively, conceding just two goal chances in contrast to the seven they coughed up a week earlier against Monaghan, while the introduction of Sean McMahon offered genuine purpose and aggression in defence.
But it’s with the ball in hand where they are utterly incoherent.
The sense is that they are trying too hard to be good at what they are not.
Post-match on Saturday evening, Brennan lamented his team’s poor execution rate, which dropped to the low 40s and in particular to an appalling conversion rate of two-pointers, having scored just two from nine attempts.
The contrast with Kerry could not have been greater, who nailed three from four and Sean O’Shea’s errant effort in the first half looked to be on target to the naked eye, but not to HawkEye’s scientific one.
David Clifford scored 0-4 against the Dubs. Nick Elliott / INPHO
Nick Elliott / INPHO / INPHO
The number that stands out is not so much Dublin’s conversion rate as the actual number of attempts in the first instance.
It is hard not to sense that it is a premeditated attempt to correct a widely perceived flaw from last season when Dublin were close to the back of the room when it came to converting outside the arc, scoring just 10 in seven championship games.
It may have been an obvious area for improvement, but it is not so much the poor execution rate that hurt Dublin on Saturday night, as the obsession with trying to set up those opportunities in the first place.
It fed into attacking plays that were slow, deliberate and lateral. In the past, there was a widely held theory that the Kerry defence was vulnerable to a direct running game, but then show us a defence who revels facing that?
Give a defence the option of being faced with aggressive, fast, penetrating movement from the opposition, or one to content to play outside it, and have a guess which one they would choose.
If Dublin should take a lesson from anyone’s playbook on that front, they should take it from O’Connor’s. Kerry have earned a reputation as being one of the most clinical outside the arc – it helps when you have O’Shea and David Clifford as the principal shooters – but it is not something which frames their gameplan.
Indeed, last spring as the novelty factor of the double-your-value point was all the chatter, it was Kerry’s almost dismissive approach to it that caught the eye. Their league campaign last season was marked by how aggressively they went after three-pointers – they scored 17 in winning the league – than a tailored approach to setting up two pointers.
The latter would come in the summer but it was more organic than rehearsed, with their attacking movement and threat inside the arc, facilitating more space outside it.
In Brennan’s search for his team to find rhyme and reason, perhaps he should go back to page one of the coaching manual which advises that you take your points and the goals will come.
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Different planets: Dublin fading to irrelevance in Kerry's pursuit of back-to-back All-Irelands
KARMA AND ALL that jazz.
Where Dublin and Kerry went last Saturday night in Croke Park, they went before in 2018 with the boot on the other foot. A national league game between the reigning All-Ireland champions and a fallen power in deep transition played out before a quarter-full stadium.
The champions came half-cocked with personnel, fully loaded with intent. They led by three at half-time, put the result beyond reach in a commanding third quarter, and when it was all over, Kerry were plunged deep in the relegation mire.
Sound familiar?
Ciarán Kilkenny and Niall Scully bagged the goals in a 2-17 to 0-11 win that would have been filed as routine but, allegedly, Dublin and Kerry do not do routine. After Saturday evening, we really should think about that again.
Back then, Dublin’s win had an obvious hook: Gavin had made a point of schooling a youthful Kerry team sprinkled with wide-eyed innocents who had graduated from their serial All-Ireland minor-winning teams, headlined by David Clifford and Seanie O’Shea.
There may have been a grain of truth in that, but given it was their 11th win on the bounce and they were at the halfway point in a six-in-a-row All-Ireland run, when it came to putting manners on teams, Gavin and Dublin were not in the habit of specifically screening who they admitted into their university of etiquette.
Still, given that Scully, Kilkenny, Clifford and O’Shea – among others – were on the same patch of grass last weekend, you wonder if for a brief second they contemplated that Trading Places is a morality tale easily exported from Wall Street to Jones’ Road.
Most likely not because the truth is, far from trading places, these days they inhabit different planets.
There would be a comfort for Dublin if Kerry had drawn some kind of satisfaction other than the points they bagged at the weekend, but that is unlikely.
If Kerry were an emerging team in 2018, Dublin, in terms of the short to mid-term, are fast approaching becoming an irrelevant one as frontline contenders.
In a shortlist of teams headed by Donegal, Armagh, Galway, Mayo, Tyrone and Derry, who Jack O’Connor will ink in as those primed to wreck his ambitions of winning back-to back for the first time, it is likely that Dublin are scratched down a second page, which is also likely to be reflected in their league status inside the next month.
And even if it was his intention to sow more doubt in a place where certainty does not exist, his team’s performance fell well shy on that front. Dirty diesel? If Kerry were a second-hand car, they would have spent most of this spring in an NCT car park near you, failing retest after retest for pollutant emissions, which goes some way to explaining their final-quarter fade-outs that have been a recurring feature this spring.
But when it matters they will motor, more than can be said for Dublin, who too will get better as the season progresses, but their improvement will be relative and limited.
In short, while O’Connor is searching for depth, Ger Brennan is just searching.
From the former’s perspective, it is all going swimmingly, with Armin Heinrich, Keith Evans and Cillian Trant all having the potential to, if not start come the summer, certainly deepen options from the bench.
For Brennan, though, his trawl for talent has a feel of desperation about it. Including the O’Byrne Cup, he has given game time to 54 players over six games, which in effect is three and a half teams.
That level of experimentation feels more like a cattle call than a transition, but given that he has inherited a job which demanded nothing less than a complete rebuild that should not surprise.
But it is not so much Brennan’s search for talent that jars, as his search to give his team an identity.
There was some encouragement at the weekend, at least defensively, conceding just two goal chances in contrast to the seven they coughed up a week earlier against Monaghan, while the introduction of Sean McMahon offered genuine purpose and aggression in defence.
But it’s with the ball in hand where they are utterly incoherent.
The sense is that they are trying too hard to be good at what they are not.
Post-match on Saturday evening, Brennan lamented his team’s poor execution rate, which dropped to the low 40s and in particular to an appalling conversion rate of two-pointers, having scored just two from nine attempts.
The contrast with Kerry could not have been greater, who nailed three from four and Sean O’Shea’s errant effort in the first half looked to be on target to the naked eye, but not to HawkEye’s scientific one.
The number that stands out is not so much Dublin’s conversion rate as the actual number of attempts in the first instance.
It is hard not to sense that it is a premeditated attempt to correct a widely perceived flaw from last season when Dublin were close to the back of the room when it came to converting outside the arc, scoring just 10 in seven championship games.
It may have been an obvious area for improvement, but it is not so much the poor execution rate that hurt Dublin on Saturday night, as the obsession with trying to set up those opportunities in the first place.
It fed into attacking plays that were slow, deliberate and lateral. In the past, there was a widely held theory that the Kerry defence was vulnerable to a direct running game, but then show us a defence who revels facing that?
Give a defence the option of being faced with aggressive, fast, penetrating movement from the opposition, or one to content to play outside it, and have a guess which one they would choose.
If Dublin should take a lesson from anyone’s playbook on that front, they should take it from O’Connor’s. Kerry have earned a reputation as being one of the most clinical outside the arc – it helps when you have O’Shea and David Clifford as the principal shooters – but it is not something which frames their gameplan.
Indeed, last spring as the novelty factor of the double-your-value point was all the chatter, it was Kerry’s almost dismissive approach to it that caught the eye. Their league campaign last season was marked by how aggressively they went after three-pointers – they scored 17 in winning the league – than a tailored approach to setting up two pointers.
The latter would come in the summer but it was more organic than rehearsed, with their attacking movement and threat inside the arc, facilitating more space outside it.
In Brennan’s search for his team to find rhyme and reason, perhaps he should go back to page one of the coaching manual which advises that you take your points and the goals will come.
That goes for two-pointers too.
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