WITH REACTION to Dublin’s win over Louth in the Leinster championship hovering between admiration for the power play which blew their opponents apart and reservations about the vigour of the challenge, one man was simply relieved to have surmounted the first hurdle, both as a team and as an individual.
Denis Bastick, whose late blooming senior career took him from doomed attempts to transform him into a full back to All-Ireland success at centrefield, where he secured an All Star nomination, had sat out nearly the whole league recuperating from injury.
“I got cartilage removed before Christmas on the knee,” he explains, “and it was just about building it back up. I was on honeymoon for the month of January, came back and tried to overload the work and the knee flared up the odd time. I have to manage it now. Less is more sometimes and it seems to be going well.”
He got the call on Saturday because last year’s centrefield partner Michael Dara Macauley picked up one of his peculiar injuries, having on this occasion been flipped over his bike handlebars.
Manager Pat Gilroy was moved to tell the post-match media conference that even his children had commented on the strange things that befall Macauley, including choking on a chicken bone last year and only just stopping short of bizarre gardening accidents.
Anyway, Bastick came in and played out the 70 minutes despite his lack of match practice, which didn’t appear to inhibit him.
“No, training was going well so there was a lot of competition and I felt in good shape coming into the game. So it was good to know that you were next in line if something goes wrong. I just tried to keep my head down and concentrate on what the management wanted me to do, and it paid off.
“We knew if it came out 60-40 on top in the middle we’d have a good chance of winning the game and theyre two very good midfielders so we knew we were up against it.”
Thirty-one this year, Bastick understands the difficulty involved in retaining an All-Ireland, something Dublin haven’t managed since the Queen of England was celebrating her silver, rather than diamond, jubilee.
“I think we need to try and be better than we were last year,” he says. “If we try and do the same as last year I don’t think it’s going to be enough, so we need to try and improve on that and be professional and be machine-like and do whatever is needed. We’re just trying to improve with each game and we need to get better for the next game again and build it up.”
On a side note, Sunday’s double bill was probably affected by the awful weather and the well-publicised traffic restrictions in Dublin’s city centre, given both matches on the double bill were being televised live.
But the crowd of 31,530 was very low for a programme featuring the Dublin footballers. You’d have to go back 12 years to find a smaller crowd watching Dublin play a championship match in Croke Park – the Leinster match against Westmeath in 2000, which drew 30,792.
In the past 20 years there have only been four other Dublin fixtures at Croke Park attended by smaller crowds than Sunday’s: Laois 1999, draw (28,371), Louth ’94 (22,274), Kildare ’94 replay (22,569) and Kildare ’94 draw (23,508).
The three matches in 1994 were during the Fifa World Cup, for which Ireland had qualified, and during the initial phase of the Croke Park redevelopment, which cut capacity that year to less than 60,000.
