Ger Cunningham says Dublin need to learn to win in Croke Park

Dublin hurling manager Ger Cunningham has said that if the county is going to be successful, they'll have to be able to win at Croke Park. Cunningham experienced his first defeat in this year's league when his former team Cork ran up a record league score of 34 points.

It was Dublin’s second match in Croke Park this year and they’ve lost both. In between they defeated both of last year’s All-Ireland finalists, Tipperary and Kilkenny. Since 2011 however the county have won both league and Leinster titles in the stadium and proved very competitive in two All-Ireland semi-finals.

“Dublin in the last couple of years have certainly performed very well on occasion at Croke Park,” said Cunningham. “If you’re looking at winning Leinster’s and All-Ireland’s Croke Park is where it’s going to be won. Okay, it’s not Dublin’s spiritual home compared to Parnell Park. It’s a different surface, different sort of pitch and so on, but if we’re going to look at being successful, Croke Park is where it’s going to be.”

He was at a loss to explain how the match, which Dublin lost 0-34 to 1-20, went so badly.

“We had one or two games and had beaten the All-Ireland champions and finalists, so when Cork come to Croke Park they see it as a great opportunity to play there. They were at the game right from the very start, whereas we made a couple of positional switches that might in hindsight not have been the thing to do. We got to look at it from our point of view and see why we didn’t perform. We were chasing it from the start.”

The most striking of these positional switches has been the move of All Star centre back Liam Rushe to full forward, a variation that Cunningham accepts has had a mixed outcome.

“It has worked in the previous couple of games that we have tried it - to an extent. We are experimenting and we have said that all along. We said all along that we were going to look at different people in different positions We have tried three or four guys in positions they are unfamiliar with to see how they’d perform and I think we’ll take it away, look at it, analyse it and see does it work. We’ll see where best for the team for Liam to play - the same as any of the other lads in the same situation.”

Finally and in answer to a recurrent question Cunningham said that he had still to decide on a team captain for the year.

“It has been asked every week. Getting to know different players within the group as to what makes them tick, who has good leadership material: we have given as many fellas as we can the chance to put their hands up and say they would like to be captain. We haven’t made a final decision yet.”