Dublin footballer Philly McMahon is cautious about that lost unbeaten sequence. When Kerry called a halt to the All-Ireland champions’ 36-match run in the league final earlier in April there was a view that the team could take consolation from going into the championship starting afresh and not manacled to a defeat-watch record.
“A lot of people come up to you and say, ‘it’s great that you’ve lost’ and now you’re going to win the whole lot but they’re negative words,” said McMahon. “We’ve got to act now. The more important thing is to get the small things done now and put them together as a group and see how much we can do individually to get collectively better.
“I always said that was about if we lost, that would be a good thing as well – not because we would get this monkey off our back but because we would learn. So there were a huge amount of ‘learnings’ in that game. I certainly learned a lot and I’m sure a lot of the other players did too.”
He reiterates his view that the main difference about Kerry this year is that they are ‘more aggressive’ even though that raised the flag on some controversy leading up to the league final.
“Yeah they were,” he maintains. “I wasn’t complaining about it. They were aggressive. We’re aggressive. Every team’s aggressive. But you know the difference between being aggressive and going a step ahead, in a good way. I like playing teams that have something different about them. So if I said Kerry were a bit more aggressive and that was a difference, that makes us step outside our comfort zone and say, ‘how do we adapt to this?’”
He is sceptical however about the amount of encouragement other counties can take from Dublin’s defeat and the loss of their league title after four years.
“Looking at it the opposite way, if I was a different county would I be happy that Dublin lost? Not really – unless I was the team that beat them. If I was the Kerry team, I’d be saying, ‘we beat Dublin’ but other counties that haven’t beaten us? I don’t think it’s a good thing for them. They haven’t beaten us.”
