DUBLIN MANAGER MICK Bohan thought he ‘was gone’ after last year’s Championship and has revealed that even after agreeing to remain in charge, he didn’t expect an All-Ireland title challenge this year.
Bohan, who was accused earlier this week of playing mind games with TG4 All-Ireland final opponents Kerry, said he wasn’t initially very hopeful about his team’s 2023 chances.
The four-in-a-row winning boss said that it’s an ‘achievement’ just to reach Sunday’s final with a new-look side.
And while Dublin are considerable favourites for success at Croke Park, the experienced manager said that when he initially weighed up the various contenders for the Brendan Martin Cup this year, he fancied 2022 runners-up Kerry.
“From the start of the year, I would have said Kerry are the best team in the competition,” said Bohan. “If we weren’t up against them, I’d be wishing them well. But we are up against them, so that changes everything.”
At one stage, Bohan thought he wouldn’t even be in charge for a seventh consecutive season. That was in the immediate aftermath of their surprise All-Ireland quarter-final loss to Donegal.
“I’d say driving away from that game, I was gone,” he said. “Definitely. But sport is funny. I can’t even tell you at this point in time what turned it around.
I do know as a management team that we felt we let ourselves down that day. And I don’t know whether it was still the ghost of the previous year. We certainly had Meath in the wing mirror.”
Despite eventually agreeing to stay on, Bohan wasn’t initially won over by Dublin’s 2023 prospects.
“I would have said to you at the start of the year that our whole modus operandi was to make this thing competitive again,” he said.
“If you’d asked me last November or December were we going to be in this position, I’d have said, no. It was just too much all in one go. So that in itself, being here, is an achievement.”
A mixture of injuries and departures weakened Bohan’s hand, though the mid-season return of veteran former captain Sinead Aherne steadied the ship. Bohan namechecked the impact of defenders Niamh Crowley and Niamh Donlon too.
“We’ve been terribly lucky over the years that we’ve had some fantastic leaders but that secondary group, the Carla Rowes, the Leah Caffreys, Jennifer Dunne, they were never put in this position before and there was no other way out, they’d have to either face it down and become leaders and take this thing by the scruff of the neck or fall,” said Bohan.
“They’ve been tremendous in standing up and taking ownership of that.”
Earlier in the week, Kerry joint manager Declan Quill felt compelled to insist that ‘we’re not a dirty team’ following a physical encounter with Dublin in the group stage of the Championship in June. Kerry won that game by two points, though had two players sin-binned.
Quill is quoted as stating that as soon as Bohan realised it would be a Dublin-Kerry rematch in the final, “Mick was like, ‘Okay, let’s put the pressure on Kerry here and let’s call them bullies and let’s get into the referee’s head’.”
At yesterday’s Croke Park event, Bohan referenced that Parnell Park encounter though in a different context, claiming that it was actually a turning point in Dublin’s campaign.
Asked when he started to think that an All-Ireland might be possible this year with his new look group, Bohan said: “I think probably the Kerry game at Parnell Park, where we felt if we could get a couple of things right then we could be a lot more competitive than we were.
“That probably was the day… We went seven points down and showed huge character to come back into it.”
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