GAELIC GAMES:THE MORNING air is crisp and cold as Pat Gilroy sips at his coffee. The city is starting to wake and go about its day beyond the walls outside on Griffith Avenue but in here all is calm, all is quiet.

These dawn press gigs have been a clever move, providing all the access the media needs while at the same time letting loose none of the insight it wants. Outside of this quick 45 minutes, you can’t get a Dublin player to answer a phone. Hence, some of the sting is taken out of the dreaded hype.

“There was a lot of times my phone was ringing but it wasn’t being answered. You’ve work here (with Dublin) to do, you’ve family life and a day job and it’s not manageable so from my own perspective I apologise to anyone who I didn’t return calls to. I just didn’t have time to do it.

“I think one of the things I’ve noticed – and some of the players have commented on – is that people are leaving them alone at the moment. They’re not talking to them about the game as much as maybe they did in the past.

“We’ve been given a fair bit of breathing space from the general public, in fairness. And that’s a good thing because, as I’ve said before, the hype is great for the game and for the supporters but it’s not great for the team.”

We put it to him that maybe it’s something more this time around. Maybe the oft-bitten Dub supporter is getting shy as the years pass? “Guys themselves have been looking for that bit of space as well from people around them. People have respected that and said, ‘If that’s going to help the team perform better then let’s give them that bit of space’.

“The other part is a factor but maybe it’s more down to the fact that people maybe have suffocated players in the past and it didn’t really work out well for the team. By just giving us a bit of space, certainly the mood is calm and relaxed.

“Hype certainly hasn’t affected us this week. It just hasn’t manifested itself. Maybe it’s overstated but in the past players have been suffocated by too much attention close to the game and just weren’t able to focus on the game.”

This will be their fourth semi-final in six years, their fifth since the advent of the qualifiers. And still no All-Ireland appearance since 1995.

Gilroy has done wonders to turn his team around since the Kerry farrago in 2009 but he acknowledges the need to kick on now. Close won’t cut it anymore. Building for the future might be reality but it’ll ring hollow if they exit now.

“For us as a group it would be a big setback,” he says. “When we left last year we all felt a little deflated by the fact that we left a game behind us that we could have won. Cork took full advantage of it on the day but this year we do need to push on as a group. It’s a very young team though. This Dublin team hasn’t been through a lot. If you look at the back line, it has an average age of 22, so you can hardly say it’s make or break for those guys.

“It is a young team and I don’t think their futures are going to be completely defined by Sunday or the rest of the year. But for us as a group it is important that we push on because we did make some progress last year and we need to do that again this year.”

Just because there’s little hype, then, it doesn’t necessarily follow that there’s little expectation. In fact, it’s purely because Gilroy has built Dublin back up brick by brick that the city’s football people can allow themselves think their team might be worth a candle again. The foundations look sounder now than they have in a long time.

“I think we are in a good place now. We were probably learning an awful lot last year about how we wanted to play and we hadn’t been that convincing in the quarter-final that we played. We had a much more confident performance this year in the quarter-final so I’d say we’re in a much stronger place. We’re longer trying to do what we set out in early 2010. Yeah, I think we’re in a much better place.”

A better place because it’s a more experienced place. Losing to Cork last year hurt but in their hearts they knew they probably weren’t ready for a final. Everything from then has been filed away for now. “There’s a number of things that happened in the last 20 minutes (of last year’s semi-final) that we’ve been working on. Probably the most significant one was our concession of frees in scoreable positions, we’ve done a lot of work on that this year and we’ve probably halved the rate on average of conceded frees in our own half.

“But there’s a whole load of other things that we’ve worked on and have been trying to make a difference. It was a one-point defeat in the end, so a lot of small things will hopefully add up to progress for us.”