LockerRoom: Ah, The Dubs. Isn't it a miracle that they are still relevant, that they can still command so many column inches and so much airtime?

People still get in Dessie Cahill's ear about them and people still fill chat rooms yakking about them and no sports columnist goes more than three or four months without churning out a Dubs column.

That has been the great legacy of the Kevin Heffernan era. The county football team progressed from its dowdy anonymity, wherein playing for the team was an entirely private matter, and developed a sort of permanent and enduring celebrity which survives trough periods and county board screw-ups and bad managers. That celebrity reaches a higher wattage when the team wins two games in a row.

The GAA both loves and loathes that cult of Dub worship. In Carlow or Fermanagh or Clare, I don't imagine they lose much sleep worrying about the health of Dublin football, even if it is a cliché that a strong Dublin team is good for the game. But, like most clichés, the one about the Dubs has a kernel of truth in it.

Dublin is the most permeable part of the country when it comes to outside influence. The GAA's survival in the city - and often it is just a matter of surviving - gives the capital at least enough distinct flavour to spare us a drowning in the bland homogeneity of mitteleurope.

That's a good thing. And a Dublin team endowed with a cockiness that every other county despises is a good thing too. It generates passion, and that is the core of what it's all about: love and passion.

The Dublin County Board (however messily) have put the matter of the management of the Dublin senior football team to bed at last. There is much brave talk in Parnell Park about continuity and much whispering among players about the dubious value of continuity.

That is Pillar Caffrey's first serious challenge. To imbue old voices with a freshness, to overcome the residual feeling among players that when they needed him to be a strong players' man ithe midst of the Tommy Lyons autocracy he wasn't there for them.

That issue is one on which it is possible to see both sides. Even during 2002, when the House of Blue was ostensibly a happy one, there was worry and dissent among the players who were accustomed in the Tommy Carr era to having vocal input into the way the team was run. The Uno Tommy, Uno Voce era was hard for them to take.

By the end of 2003 players were steeling themselves for a putsch. It never came. When 2004 wound down and Tommy Lyons went, there was relief on all sides. Everyone had had enough of each other.

But Pillar Caffrey's head-down existence hadn't helped his popularity.

On the other hand, what was Caffrey to do? Co-opted onto a selectorial team which projected one very strong voice, he could do nothing but help preserve the appearance of unity. It would have been easy to walk away and leave the players to their fate. It would have been easy to constantly snipe behind Tommy Lyons' back and play a double game - being one thing to the players and another to Lyons.

Or he could preserve the integrity of the managerial set-up and hope that the time would come when he could make his own input.

Now that time has come, and it is significant that the welcome afforded Caffrey by Dublin players hasn't even approached lukewarm as yet.

It would be best, though, for all concerned to forget the past and to move on quickly. Dublin's graph pointed downwards for the last two seasons. Continuity is valueless. Freshness is the challenge. From management and players.

After all, the Dublin players as a collective came close but lacked the cojones to stage a coup in 2003. Why should that responsibility have fallen on a selector? Just as any county player will play for a manager that picks him, most selectors will line up behind the manager that chose him for the job.

Besides, there is an interesting freshness to the line-up, not just in the newly unfettered personalities of Caffrey and Dave Billings, but in the addition of Paul Clarke and Brian Talty.

Clarke is well liked and has shown a surprising aptitude for management with Whitehall, while Talty is perhaps the shrewdest operator within the game in Dublin.

It has to be said that some incidents on the sideline/field of play and his peripatetic movement between Dublin clubs has earned him the intense dislike of many people in the city. As a rule of thumb, these people have no difficulty with the county team picking players with bad disciplinary records or picking players who have switched clubs. They'd have been happy with Mick O'Dwyer as manager, but they denounce Talty as a mercenary. Ability is ability, though, and Dublin need that input.

Two new faces and a new attitude will have to suffice as the injection of freshness for the senior footballers. And it will suffice. Footballers always know that too much moaning and groaning about freshness is easily solved by bringing in a few fresh players and jettisoning some whingers. The Dublin players badly want to win. They'll get down to it.

The new regime is media friendly, as Dublin outfits should be. Media attention is part of the mix for the city team. Ask any player would he like to time travel back to, say, 1972, when not even his closest family would have known where he was on a Sunday afternoon when he was playing for Dublin. He knows in his heart that after a couple of mucky afternoons he'd be screaming I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here.

The current Dublin panel know that they are maybe just a scoring forward away from being good enough for an All-Ireland. The appliance of science stuff will always get mixed reviews, but until a player is seen leaning forward over the sideline with his hands on his knees as he vomits late in a game we can assume that the fitness of most top teams is roughly the same. What would Dublin prefer, world class sports science back-up or Colm Cooper?

Brian Mullins would say that in the absence of the latter a little of the former wouldn't go astray. Maybe, but the search for a few new players will be the first pressing task of the new regime.

Some success would be good. There are patches of Dublin where no GAA clubs exist and other parts where giant GAA clubs process thousands of youngsters who drop away in large numbers because there is only one A team they can play for. They'd be better playing for smaller, local clubs. The city needs more clubs and needs to decide on what the optimum size for a club is.

And hurling in the capital needs quiet nurture while everyone is lavishing attention on football. Is it not possible to place 12 good, passionate and full-time hurling coaches in a dozen clubs where they'd work with existing coaches, and in local schools, and evangelise until they produced a little hurling county within a footballing power? Probably not, as the dozens and dozens of clubs who currently pay lip service to hurling would whinge too much.

It's a football world and we Dubs all live in it. The rest is draft plans and aspirations, so the prospect of a blue September is all we have to look forward to.

All yours, Pillar.