DUBLIN’S DEPARTURE from the league following failure to qualify for the semi-finals represents a break with recent practice.

The team which won last year’s All-Ireland title arguably was a two-year project, beginning with the vastly-improved competitiveness during the league season of 2010, which had included wins away in Kerry and Tyrone, the counties who at that point had split the previous seven All-Irelands between them.

That summer Dublin’s tightly-balanced All-Ireland semi-final against eventual champions Cork ended in narrow defeat. The following spring the county progressed through the league regulation schedules unbeaten before losing to Cork, again by a point, in the final and from that base launched the county’s first successful championship campaign for 16 years. Coincidentally, another one-score loss to Cork on Sunday rounded off a mediocre league campaign to leave manager Pat Gilroy and his back-room team in the unusual position of having to guide a team in less than inspiring form in the even less familiar task of defending an All-Ireland championship.

One of Gilroy’s key advisers is Niall Moyna, Professor in the DCU School of Health and Human Performance, whose area of expertise is fitness and conditioning. He has few concerns about maintaining the necessary standards.

“Dublin will take the next three weeks off and that will leave a five-week build-up to the championship, which is more than adequate. The players may do a little bit of conditioning work on their own but they’ll be looking forward then to coming back. Compared to even five or six years ago most players are looking after themselves and training most of the year, so physically it doesn’t take an awful lot to get them ready for the demands of the game. Tactically – that’s a totally different ball game but physically they should be fine.”

Eamon Cregan said the difference between Limerick’s All-Ireland winning team in 1973 and the one that lost the final a year later was that whereas they believed they were doing the same work and approaching preparation in the same way, they weren’t as focused or as committed.

It’s become a perennial problem in football, where the All-Ireland has been retained just once in over 20 years. “It’s probably the most difficult task,” according to Moyna, who adds in his experience coaching DCU’s Sigerson Cup teams in recent years. “Each year we won three Sigersons, we probably had better teams the year after with a lot of the same personnel. It just was difficult to get them to the same level that they had been at the year they won. It’s the same with all teams – because of the knock-out nature of the competition, on a given day you have to perform or you’re out.

“It’s one of the key factors – trying to create the same environment you had the previous year and the same drive, the same hunger. That’s the big challenge.”

The question of physical training is also an issue for a team that was seen to have achieved such high levels last season. Kerry manager Jack O’Connor suggested at one stage Dublin were the fittest team ever to have played football. Moyna demurs from such absolutism and maintains residual fitness means teams should be more precise in how they prepare and that the dangers of over-training – which he says takes about six weeks to remedy – mean that comprehensive data should be compiled.

“It’s a difficult one to manage; you really have to know your players. One of the things I’ve been pushing for a number of years is that teams would regularly assess fitness levels, particularly aerobic fitness levels or speed, and do it on a regular basis so they have an idea where their teams are from year to year rather than training for the sake of training and having no idea what the end-target is supposed to be . . . I think two days a week plus one of the weekend days are more than enough for teams to be training, even for those teams who want to peak earlier in the championship – more than adequate.”

Yet Dublin received much publicity about their early morning sessions in January of last year and the need to intensify them in 2012 to meet the demands of staying on top. “The perception is different to the reality. We train one night a week through the league – that’s a 50-minute session. But again we’re getting to play games every week. Is training an end in itself or a means to an end? A number of our early-season sessions were in the morning but that’s because Pat would be conscious of the need to limit the demands on players at that time of the year.”

Of the demands ahead, he says the ubiquity of video technology means that to stay ahead, teams need to evolve and develop their approach. “Every team looks for your weakest point and goes after it so we have to ask, ‘what’s the next step for us?’”