LEINSTER SFC QUARTER-FINAL:Last year's ultimate humiliation at the hands of Kerry meant Dublin's manager had no option but to try and fashion a new team with very different attributes, writes TOM HUMPHRIES

ONE OF the joys of life in a city as garrulous as Dublin is that everybody has a theory as to why the senior football team have won just a single All-Ireland since 1983.

In a county where close to 80,000 will turn up for a first round game, the media take an annual pelting for hyping up the Blues every spring. It’s chicken and egg stuff of course. Would the 80,000 be there without the media. Would the media be that interested without the 80,000. Whatever. Players should be used to it by now.

Manager of course are frequently dragged to the stockade. In Dublin the expression of impatience and frustration is often ugly and vulgar and the first requirement for the job is a thick skin. Beyond that though, there is little evidence Dublin managers since Kevin Heffernan are any more smart or any more stupid than their colleagues beyond the Pale.

The club system is often blamed, particularly the democratisation of the old senior football leagues. SFL One as it was known was an elite plateau to which every club aspired. Now Dublin has a plethora of Adult Football Leagues and detractors argue that they mean less.

Then there is the nature of the city. It’s one big dance floor and just being a Dublin panellist can make you somebody before you have won anything, even a Leinster senior medal. Not just access to CopperFace Jacks but a thousand euro here and a thousand euro there for talking to the press for a few minutes while wearing this type of top of pushing those kind of shoes.

Alan Brogan was available for interview last week courtesy of a sportsgear manufacturer. Rory O’Carroll is available next week courtesy of a company who make vests for under your gear. Rory O’Carroll is a fine player and will be appearing next week with Killian Young of Kerry.

The difference is Killian Young has three All-Ireland senior medals and a Young Player of the Year Award at home. Rory O’Carroll is on the very foothills of what hopefully will be a fine career.

Everything but success comes quickly to Dublin footballers. And so the theories run on and on as if there was a single answer for the annual failure of a county which has access to a broad playing population, the best resources, good finances. A county whose constant exposure to hype should have by now inoculated players against its symptoms. A county which, despite the absence of silverware, has its players exposed to Croke Park on a big day at least once or twice a year.

The answer may at once be more prosaic and more unpalatable. Those who have read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers or Matthew Syed’s Bounce will be familiar with the theory that talent, if it exists at all, is overrated. From Mozart to Tiger Woods it is demonstrated again and again that what we romantically like to assume is great natural talent is always and without exception the result of obsessive practice. Ten thousand hours of it is the rule of thumb. Ten thousand hours or roughly ten years of worthwhile practice.

Naturally other elements filter in. Who is motivated to do 10,000 hours of practice? Has that person access to the cutting edge coaching that will make that practice useful and keep pushing them on? And is there a spark of identification which fuels motivation? This can be the smallest thing.

How many of the players who went for Ireland to Japan and South Korea in 2002 had watched Ireland in Italy in 1990?

How many of the wave of Russian female tennis players who have come into the game watched Anna Kournikova reach the Wimbledon semi-final in 1997? What influence did she have on producing ten years or so later Maria Sharapova, Anastasia Myskina, Elena Dementieva, Svetlana Kuznetsova, Vera Zvonareva, Nadia Petrova, Mikhail Youzhny, Nikolai Davydenko, Dmitry Tursunov, Marat Safin etc?

Look at the evidence in Gaelic football. The last minor wins of most big football counties correspond to the rule. Dublin won the minor in 1984, ten years after the great breakthrough of 1974. Kerry were All-Ireland minor champs for the last time in 1994 a decade after the lap of honour started. Cork were minor champs in 2000, senior champs in 1990. There were nine years between Galway’s 2007 minor win and the senior title of 1998, same for Derry in 2002.

Armagh’s 2009 minor title came ten years after their breakthrough in Ulster, Down’s 2005 minor all Ireland 11 years after the 1994 senior win. Tyrone’s heroics in 1986 surely fed into the minors win of 1998, and being beaten in the 1995 senior final surely influenced the minors of 2004 and 2008.

Gaelic football is a team sport so the science is less exact. You get first year minors and second year minors and after that, even at under 21 level, teams are made up of the best of what is eligible.

Still there is sufficient evidence to suggest the ten year rule holds good for Gaelic football in that events which kids identify with sustain their practice, adult coaches pick up on talented waves and, a decade after some senior breakthrough, a wave of talented kids will arrive.

All this is slightly distressing in Dublin’s case. There are still enough players being produced year in, year out to bring a respectable level of achievement at under-21 level and that alone should keep Dublin where they are for another half decade at least. But to have a famine at minor level stretching back 26 years suggests a thread is broken, that there is some substance to the common complaint that Dublin produces athletes and not footballers.

(The most ‘natural’ looking footballers on the current panel are the Brogan brothers, Alan and Bernard, and it is tempting and romantic to suggest that having a mother from Kerry and an All-Ireland-winning father from Dublin was a genetic gift to them)

The truth more likely is that having a father who played, growing up in a house of boys (a third brother, Paul is almost equally as talented), going to a traditional Gaelic football school, being the leading brand name in their club Oliver Plunketts, being on the first Dublin development squad (Alan) and not spending significant amount of time hurling meant the Brogan boys got their 10,000 hours of football in during the allotted time spell.

In a county which still romances about the dual star, where the concept of the traditional GAA school is becoming alarmingly rare, where soccer and rugby compete aggressively for a young players spare time, are kids getting 10,000 hours of good developmental practice?

Does the obsession with retaining numbers in clubs hold back the kids who should be pushing ahead? Do travel times in the city limit the playing times? Has Dublin stopped making those magic moments which inspire the generation ten years down the road? Dublin has stopped producing or maybe can’t produce the hurler who spends 10,000 hours in the local hurling field, every evening, every weekend afternoon, every waking moment.

The same with footballers. Nobody in Killarney can remember seeing Colm Cooper without a football from the time he could walk. DJ Carey’s days in Gowran were spent bashing the sliotar against the gable end. In Dublin heads are shaken. We just don’t produce those natural talents do we!

In football and hurling Dublin are trying to manufacture teams in such a way as to bypass the 10,000 hour rule. Athleticism, muscle, bonding, defensive tactics, character and training, training, training will, it is hoped, substitute for the failure to produce graduates of the calibre that the big football and hurling counties produce. There can be but limited success down that road but in Croke Park last August, when Kerry ran riot, Dublin did indeed, as Pat Gilroy put it, look like “startled earwigs”.

The problems are institutionalised, besetting senior teams well below the level of media hype or premature celebrity or poor competition in Leinster. The conundrum facing the Dublin footballers is not whether a Colm Cooper can be found in the next few months. There isn’t one. The conundrum is how to compensate.

A lot of Pat Gilroy’s career has been about quietly proving people wrong. Most of what people think they know about him is wrong anyway. Kevin Heffernan isn’t his godfather. Nor did Heffernan drive his appointment through. Pat O’Neill introduced Gilroy’s name to the selection committee when asked who he thought was the brightest of the 1995 panel. Heffernan didn’t staple Mickey Whelan to Gilroy’s sleeve when he got the job. The pair had an almost symbiotic relationship through St Vincent’s All-Ireland win in 2008. It was a natural partnership.

Gilroy is neither soft nor naive. He turned a modest amount of talent into a long career which brought senior All-Ireland medals at club and county level and often in the latter years would lose heroic amounts of weight through the summer months as he kept pushing his club career onwards.

And when he has to be ruthless he is that. Names who felt that they were part of the fabric of Dublin inter-country football have vanished from the current set-up.

The move to nail down Ross and Rory O’Carroll for the football panel was audacious and hurt the hurling community. Gilroy would argue Dublin have a natural full back now for the first time in a long time. End of story.

And he is pragmatic. The usual accusations that he was a St Vincent’s appointment slotted in to keep St Vincent’s well- represented at county level hasn’t stood up. Tomorrow’s first XV includes no representative from the 2008 All-Ireland club champion side which Gilroy played on and Whelan managed.

The closest call would have been for the number two shirt. Paul Conlon of St Vincent’s would have been seen as slightly ahead. Mick Fitzsimons of Cuala won the jersey though, the first Cuala man in there since the late Mick Holden graced the full back line.

Gilroy is influenced too by the old template of placing character at a premium when picking players. Dublin have been training six times a week in recent times. Three early mornings and three late nights. There is a law of diminishing returns applicable to that sort of work for players who must fit a day’s work and a family life into that schedule but it sorts the wheat from the chaff in terms of character.

Following last summer’s disaster it was clear if better footballers weren’t available in Dublin, different footballers and different characters had to be available. It was impossible to continue with a side which kept choking at the knockout stages of the All-Ireland series.

Gilroy took the hard path of dismantling the side and his team selections through the league represent progress through empiricism, a direct enough route from A to B with a few necessary digressions thrown in.

The full back line, which for many years now has been staffed mainly by wing backs and refugee midfielders, is kitted out with specialists. When Ross O’Carroll returns to full fitness the list of options will be complete.

The half back line has been a curse for many years now. For a long time every Dublin half back wanted to be an adventurous Kevin Moran, then they wanted to be Keith Barr. Gilroy has gone for a line whose primary function will be to shut up shop. Again Hugh Gill is a more skilful player than at least two of the three who start tomorrow but the line has the appearance of bouncers at a club. You approach them with respect.

Along with Cian O’Sullivan, who started every league game at centre back, the midfield pairing of Ross McConnell and Eamon Fennell are the other two main pillars of the new side. Which may prove to be unfortunate.

Dublin will have looked at the debut of Cork’s Aidan Walsh last week with some envy. McConnell looks the part but has yet to convincingly play the part. Fennell has fine hands but many who have watched the tug-of-love over his club membership in Dublin are keen to see how he fares on the hard open summer prairies of Croker before making their mind up on him.

The harsh fact is there aren’t many choices out there. Ciarán Whelan and Shane Ryan have their supporters. . . but when the game is transition, them is the breaks. McConnell and Fennell weren’t going to get any better sitting watching players in their thirties push on for yet another season.

Alan Hubbard, another long- term Gilroy project (he and Kevin McManamon have been firmly in the frame for some time) is absent from the forwards only due to injury. Niall Corkery is somewhat charmed to have squeezed on having made just one appearance in the league, albeit scoring an eye-catching goal.

If not on Sunday then one Sunday soon, Alan and Bernard Brogan and Conal Keaney will make up half the Dublin forward lines. The other half will be tough and doughty.

Hopefully tomorrow Wexford will be the Wexford of 2008 or something close. Dublin need to to be pushed and harried. Gilroy, one imagines, would welcome a little bit of a scare, some questions asked about character and toughness. Character and toughness. Those are the qualities which Gilroy built a long playing career on. He has no choice but to centre his managerial career around the search for players carrying the same characteristics.