Dublin's supersub wants to make the next step up to a place among the 15 who take the field, writes IAN O'RIORDAN

“BACK At the scene of the crime,” says Kevin McManamon, presumably without any great intention to further irate Kerry supporters.

With that he takes a quick glance at the Croke Park pitch, and smiles: McManamon’s goal, with seven minutes to go in last September’s All-Ireland football final, was perhaps the ultimate difference between Dublin winning the title for the first time in 16 years, and letting it slip.

Perhaps the reason McMananon might soon be forgiven in Kerry but never forgotten, or perhaps the other way round – is he’s going to be a marked man in 2012, no matter who Dublin are playing.

As it happens they face Kerry again on Saturday evening as the headline act in the opening round of the Allianz Football League, and McManamon is back in Croke Park to help begin the drum roll.

He admits he has no recollection now of how he actually scored that goal, except for the visual reminders he’s got from the countless television replays in the four months since.

Anyway, he’s more concerned with the future now, and nailing down a starting place not just for Saturday’s rematch against Kerry, but into the summer, and beyond.

At 25, McManamon should be coming into his prime, and he has every intention of maximising it.

“Absolutely,” he says. “For me personally, it’s about taking the next step. I wasn’t able to start last year, but I did what I had to do from the bench.

“So, yeah, it’s all about trying to nail down that starting spot this year, take it to the next level.”

Dublin manager Pat Gilroy might well be tempted to leave McManamon where he is, given his amazing impact as a substitute – not just against Kerry, but also the All-Ireland semi-final, when the forward also came off the bench for the last 20 minutes, and kicked one of the vital late scores.

“Well I hope Pat doesn’t get any ideas that might be where I’m staying,” he notes. “I do hope to play against Kerry on Saturday. I’ve played a lot of league football now the last two years, and it has stood to me.

“But in fairness to Pat and the rest of the selectors, if you’re not performing they’ll tell you. I had one or two weak matches in training as well so it wasn’t a huge surprise.

“Obviously I was disappointed, but once you’re told you’re not playing the only way to react is to get on with the job at hand.

“Even in the All-Ireland final, I was disappointed not to start, but you know you have to do your best for the team.”

The feeling is Gilroy has been working hard on getting last September’s victory out of Dublin’s systems, in more ways than one: he promptly resumed the 6am training sessions at the start of January, and it’s reckoned Dublin could have trained collectively 40 times this month alone.

“Between the training and the matches, yeah, maybe,” says McManamon. “But we needed that bank of work to even think about coming out here again to play Kerry in the first game.

“We’d a lot of gym work done, but we needed to get back at the fitness.

“It’s about training smart as well. I don’t know if we put in the same hours as last year, but it was a lot harder stuff. A lot more sharpening stuff, although not a whole lot of difference, really.”

What has been different is the absence of trainer and selector Mickey Whelan.

“You’d miss him, alright, shouting at you at six in the morning, in the bitter cold. But he’s passed on a lot of his wisdom, thank God, and is still passing on drills, and some techniques.”

In the popular Hill 16 player profiles, McManamon answers the “best advice you ever got” question by saying “work on your weaknesses” – and that would actually apply quite well across Dublin’s season in 2011.

He recalls the league final defeat to Cork last May as something that reflected the Dublin weaknesses, as much as Cork’s strengths, and yet was something he felt Dublin addressed later on.

“I think we did take the foot off the pedal,” he says, referring to Dublin’s surrendering of an eight-point lead, “and then weren’t able to pick it up again when Cork came back at us. We did switch off, were thinking ‘we’ve won this game’ and things like ‘where’ll we go tonight?’ Maybe we just weren’t 100 per cent focused on our game.

“But there was no one in our group questioning our bottle. We dealt with it the only way you can, learn from it.

“Like in the Donegal game, when we were three points down, we managed to keep the heads, and kick the last five points on the bounce to make the All-Ireland final.”

And the rest, as McManamon helped ensure, was history.