Leinster SFC Semi-final: Ian O'Riordan talks to two men who help make Dublin tick, selector Paul Clarke and Prof Niall Moyna
Achtung, Germany. For two weeks now you've taken over the world and made it increasingly difficult to take our game very seriously. Sitting in the dusty old stands of places like St Tiernach's Park and the Gaelic Grounds, sometimes for a full 35 minutes without seeing one team score, it's our game that seems sad and completely foreign, so opposed to the skill and grace of your beautiful game.
But our game is about to strike back.
The Dubs are coming to Croke Park, ready to restore normality. By tomorrow evening the football championship will be back in its rightful place, the headline act on the sporting stage. The many dull memories of recent weeks will vanish and together we'll be tangled up in blue again. Gaelic football has always needed the Dubs, it just needs them now more than ever.
They've made it before and now they can make it again. Just when it seemed like we'd be stuck in Saipan for the entire summer of 2002, when our game seemed as bogged down as now, the Dubs won their first Leinster title in seven years. Gaelic football suddenly changed the mood of the entire capital. Whenever our game is facing a threat or crisis the Dubs can pull it through. No one knows that more than the GAA. A few weeks back they announced a grand plan to take on Germany and market our games for all they are worth. Instead they sat on it and realised all they need to do is get the Dubs into Croke Park for a big match. If that doesn't get people talking about our games nothing will.
The Dubs have that power, and are ready to unleash it again. If they can beat Laois in tomorrow's Leinster semi-final they'll be back in Croke Park on July 16th and by then maybe even the Polish population of the city will be supporters of our game. If they keep coming back to Croke Park into September our game will feel almost global again, the greatest show on earth. And why not? Last summer the Dubs won the Leinster title by improving from match to match. They had Tyrone on the verges of the exit door before their engine stalled and they faced a replay. Tyrone got two goals at key moments and won handily.
For the rest of the year people talked about the big three - Tyrone, Kerry and Armagh. And how if the Dubs could find a couple of extra players and make moderate improvements they could join them. Nothing that happened in the National League changed that perception. Then the Dubs went to Longford three weeks ago and won by two points. History tells us a year ago the Dubs beat that same opposition by 19 points. Longford probably improved enough to close half that gap, and the rest, it would seem, was accounted for by the Dubs' decline. Indeed it appeared some players had heads and bodies that had never met, while some patterns of play resembled a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
The Dubs' last All-Ireland success is starting to feel very 1995 - something we can vaguely remember, but just can't really relate to anymore. Which is why Gaelic football needs the Dubs more than ever. If the Dubs can make those moderate improvements on last summer - especially with Tyrone, Kerry and Armagh looking so nervous - the game can laugh in the face of Germany and feel stronger than it's ever been.
When Paul Caffrey first opened a thick, spiral-bound notebook marked "Dublin Training: 2006", and first met up again with his backroom team of Brian Talty, Dave Billings and Paul Clarke, he had two things to wonder about.
1) Where did it ultimately go wrong in 2005? If Dublin could prove themselves the best team in Leinster, why couldn't they quite prove themselves the best of the rest?
And 2) if Dublin did, in fact, come relatively close to outright success last year, assuming the players and management were giving it 100 per cent at the time, how can they now improve on that, and give it 110 per cent?
They're some of the oldest questions in any sport. Caffrey's style of management is to spread the responsibilities, and collectively come up with the answers. He constantly refers to himself as a "facilitator" - giving each of his selectors a well-defined role, giving the players the attention they need, and ultimately "facilitating" them all to get the best out of themselves.
Clarke's role in the Dublin management seems as well defined as any. Beyond his knowledge of what it actually takes to win an All-Ireland (he played centre forward in the 1995 team, and also in Dublin's last minor success of 1984), Clarke is one of the first to show up at training, gearing the place up for the various sessions to follow. His role in the Dublin management goes something along the lines of the Olympic motto - citius, altius, fortius.
"Initially my role was one of just another selector," says Clarke. "I think Pillar was also aware that I'd trained by own club Whitehall for a few years, and coached some other smaller teams prior to that as well. So I did have a background in that end of coaching, and had also done physical and weight training courses before.
"But I have to say, since my own days as a county footballer, and then my work at club level, I just didn't realise the advances that had taken place in the GAA when it came to the preparation of teams. There's no doubt the Northern teams started a lot of it four or five years ago, became a lot more specific about it. But it was only after I got involved that I realised exactly what was going on."
So what exactly was going on?
"The whole scene has changed immensely, all the methods of training really. Each player has an individual requirement now. You have to look at each player and design specific training for them, based on where they're at and where they play, and what physical requirements they need to play in those positions.
"We've done studies that look at the type of running a defender would do compared to a midfielder, and then those two compared to the running a forward would do. And they're all different. So first of all you're looking at their physical requirements for a match, and then their specific physical make-up, and whether there's a weakness there that needs to be worked on. So in many ways you're trying to tailor each group session, but each player session as well. But that's been done throughout the country. There's nothing new in what Dublin are doing there."
"I'd always had a background in the gym work, and would have always done weight training on my own. But that probably was the exception, because the requirements these days are totally different. The days are long gone when teams would just be sent out to run 20 laps of the field."
Even the term weight training is outdated - it's now strength and power training. When Caffrey took over as manager in November 2004 one of the first things he did was take the Dublin panel into the sports science department of Dublin City University, and consult the expertise of Prof Niall Moyna and Dr Kieran Moran.
Moyna and Moran helped design Dublin's strength and power programme - and while they're not directly involved with what happens on the field of play - that influence has carried through. DCU's elite gym is where Dublin get faster, higher, stronger.
"Essentially the backroom team are self-sufficient now," explains Moyna. "All Dublin's strength and power training still has an input from DCU, but all the endurance work and running and that kind of stuff is left up to them. But the main advice I gave them this year was I felt Dublin had reached a new level last year, and didn't really need to tinker a whole lot with that. That had an excellent aerobic base, as good as any team in the country, and what I recommended was playing a lot of small-sided games to improve their ball skills, and also game-specific conditioning.
"Quite obviously Dublin have a highly motivated group of players, and as far as I can tell they've all adhered rigorously to the strength and power programme we laid out for them. So what is unique about Dublin's approach this year is they had an off-season conditioning programme, which means they were never more than 10 to 15 per cent away from their peak conditioning of last summer - most of them anyway.
"I also think a lot teams, having reached a certain level in their first year, come back and try to almost double that the next year. But there's no way you can double the amount of fitness. You might get a five or even 10 per cent increase, and that's about it. So teams do have to be very careful that they don't over-compensate for lack of skill through fitness.
"I would always rather see a team focus more on the ball and skill work in their second year, because too much time and investment in raising the fitness levels just aren't going to make the improvements you need. So really, the training this year has been focused on ball work and skill work, and, say, reaction time and speed. That's the approach Dublin have taken on board this year. Rather then running around the fields again. There was no need for that this year as long as Dublin had an appropriate off-season conditioning system, which I think will be their biggest asset."
With that advice in mind, Clarke went about finding the room for those small levels of improvement in 2006. Though it's not always obvious what needs fixing and what isn't broken.
"Last year was a big learning process for us," says Clarke, "but I wouldn't say we've changed things too much. We've just raised the bar for ourselves and the players, in the hope we'll all get better. That was the key, really. And that started with the management. We had to do our job a little better, raise the bar of our own preparations and performances, so the players could do likewise. You have to move on. If you stick to the same things other teams will pass you by. We would have kept records of everything we did last year. Say like match-day preparations. What we did then, and could we adjust it to make it better.
"There is a short-term gain to be had when you prepare for a specific game, but you also have to look at a bigger picture. And look at a season. Such as when you would like your players to peak. The lads at DCU have been very helpful with that. We have our own ideas as well, to move it on. But I think we are still progressing, and I'd hope we are a better prepared team than last year."
What Clarke seems to be suggesting is Dublin didn't exactly peak for the Longford game: "Yeah, it was different kind of challenge for us. Preparation for that game was different, like the travelling away to a different type of venue. But we were at a certain level of fitness for that game, and I think we've moved on from that now. And hopefully that will show on Sunday."
Moyna reckons the Longford match was "the best thing that could have happened to . . . " (Oops, that was off the record). Caffrey has reacted by recalling players such as Jason Sherlock and Ray Cosgrove, which hardly screams of progress in terms of the potential in younger forwards, but if they're the ones most capable of doing the job for Dublin then maybe those small levels of improvement aren't as far off as some people think.
"Dublin didn't lose any game last year because of lack of fitness," says Moyna, "and they won't lose any game this year because of lack of fitness. In fact, very few teams that reach the last eight in the championships, and more so the last four, will lose a game because of lack of fitness. That just doesn't happen anymore. At the end of the day, you can do all the fancy preparations you like, but if you don't have the individual players in the team to put the ball over the bar or into the back of the net you'll win nothing. That's still what it's all about."
