ON GAELIC GAMES:AT HALF-TIME on Monday, Martin McHugh gave up. The former Donegal All-Ireland winner and pundit said that there was no point in trying to preview matches any more. For most – although to be fair, not all – in the press box there was empathy for his bafflement, writes SEÁN MORAN

There had been nothing in Kerry’s form to suggest a big performance or in Dublin’s to indicate that they hadn’t improved sufficiently to position themselves as a real threat.

That’s all water under the bridge now, as Dublin’s aspirations have once again been carried away on a torrent.

There are many angles to what happened on the Bank Holiday. Maybe the first is that opinions – those of both pundits and public – are remarkably malleable. I remember asking a reporter who covered an infinity of Kerry All-Ireland wins during the Mick O’Dwyer era had the whole process not been a little boring, a bit too predictable.

He disagreed, saying that you never knew for certain what was going to happen in any given year and that willingness to wonder can be seen every year.

The perfect perspective of the record books can accordingly be misleading. Future generations may shake their heads in wonder at the sight of Dublin in this decade winning five Leinsters on the trot and not qualifying for even one All-Ireland final.

The county is within one season of equalling the provincial record for consecutive titles but the previous holders of that distinction, Wexford (1913-18), Kildare (1926-31) and Dublin themselves (1974-79) reached the All-Ireland final in every one of those years, adding four-in-a-row, two and three titles respectively.

In this era of quarter-finals, in this decade Dublin haven’t even reached the semi-finals in the majority of those years. Fundamentally there’s no escaping the fact that for a second year running and under different management, the Leinster champions looked supine and devoid of initiative – haunted even by the nightmare that began to unfold within 40 seconds of the throw-in.

Repetition in sport is key to performance. Keep doing the things you do well even when a match is turning against your team.

The problem for unsuccessful teams is repeating associations with failure: becoming good at losing. Dublin must have known that Kerry would try and target their fragile self-confidence at an early stage and must have been correspondingly anxious to repeat the blitz start they had made against Kildare in the Leinster final.

Instead they conceded the early goal themselves. Was there a blue-clad supporter in the ground who didn’t fear at the moment Colm Cooper wheeled around after hitting the net in less than a minute – the early goal, scored by the last player whose confidence Dublin wanted restored – that the devastation which duly arrived was on the cards? If not how must the players have felt? “Here we go again,” presumably?

There was no rising to the challenge. Few opted to chase loose ball for fear of losing their man. Forwards were isolated and hunted down in possession at the very stage the match needed to be chased. Fear intensified into panic and quickly became resignation.

Jason Sherlock was replaced in a switch that attracted some criticism but shockingly it didn’t matter. The match was over. By the 23rd minute of an All-Ireland quarter-final Dublin had been beaten.

Sherlock has the most sobering perspective of all. In his first season he was a teenage sensation, as Dublin swept to the county’s last All-Ireland in 1995. It’s sometimes forgotten that he contributed significantly to that success, his displays as an elusive, fast-running full forward with both the energy to show for ball and the threat of a goalscorer providing a team that had come close with the final piece of a winning jigsaw.

After the final success against Tyrone, achieved while a man short for most of the match and against Ulster opposition, which had ended their championship in the previous three years, there was reason to be hopeful Dublin had re-established the respect in which the county had previously been held.

Had he been told that his career would last for a further 14 seasons, Sherlock would surely have thought that he would have had more than one All-Ireland medal and certainly the experience of further All-Ireland final days.

Instead the county has become a rite of passage for serious opponents. Should Kerry win this year’s All-Ireland it means that three of the four teams to have defeated Dublin in the quarter-finals will have gone on to win the title, as did five of the eight sides to have eliminated Dublin from the championship.

Good enough, in other words, to be sparring partners for prospective champions but not good enough to win titles themselves.

The poor state of Leinster football hasn’t helped. Half of the eight teams to have taken home Sam Maguire during the era of the qualifiers had to regroup after defeat in their province. In the absence of the heavyweight opposition that Meath used to provide (on eight of the nine occasions that they beat Dublin since 1986, Meath were either champions or en route to an All-Ireland or, on two occasions, at least a final), Dublin don’t lose in Leinster.

As a result defeat comes at an irreversible stage with no opportunity to learn from mistakes or reconfigure a misfiring team. For the players there is no quick opportunity for the pent-up rage at humiliations such as Monday’s to be expressed, as it invariably is, by improved performance.

This isn’t to suggest that Dublin are a redeemable defeat away from being contenders and in any event, the experience of 2003 and ’04 doesn’t suggest that the county has been able to position itself any better to take on heavyweight contenders by going around the outside track.

There are also questions for development structures. Are there too few clubs in the city? Can it make sense for only 15 players to be able to represent vast swathes of suburbs in senior football? There is great work being done in the county and GAA clubs have footholds in places that never had them previously but the association is ultimately better off with clubs stretching to fill teams, being obliged to make the best of what’s there and fostering late developers rather than replacing one Féile winner with another and making a discard of someone with talent.

Why is it impossible to find a specialist full back? Or at least why is it so hard to adapt players to fill the role when Mickey Harte appears able to toss a number three jersey to anyone in the Tyrone dressingroom and rest easy? What is different about coaching structures in successful counties and those in the capital? Dublin need more answers than simply why the perennially lop-sided rivalry with Kerry once again took a turn for the worse.

In the weekend’s Sunday Times Dara Ó Cinnéide made a characteristically well-judged point. “We go romancing about the rivalry (with Dublin) when we’re winning. You won’t hear a lot of talk about the rivalry with Tyrone though.”

That’s the cloud on Kerry’s horizon; Dublin must simply wish that they could see theirs.