THIRTY-FIVE thousand at Croke Park, the sparkle of three goals set into a buoyant win against the All-Ireland champions and a league record standing at two from two – but February is no time for a manager to be pleased with himself. Pat Gilroy understands this and was careful to react to Dublin’s victory as prosaically as possible.
“It was good to win,” he said, “but we mixed the good with the bad again. We were lucky not to concede any goals there and Stephen’s saves were exceptional. At the end Paul got a great block in and there were a lot more goal chances than you’d see, say, in a championship match. In Croke Park in February that’s going to happen. From a spectator’s point of view it was an open game.”
Having suffered in the past from a tendency to foul under pressure, Dublin posted an impressive concession of just three frees in the second half.
“We’ve been talking about this for the last six months,” said Gilroy. “We knew it was something we had to really work on. To be honest, we were disappointed with the number we gave away in the first half and we talked as a group that it wasn’t good enough and we made a big effort to give away less in the second half.
“On a slippy pitch in February it can be just a little slip and you give away a free, but we were happy to limit the number we gave away.”
The last time Conor Counihan had taken a media conference here, he was celebrating an All-Ireland title. A few months on and the context has changed.
“Conceding three goals at this level isn’t good enough,” he said, “and if you concede them you aren’t going to win games. We created quite a few opportunities, but we didn’t take them and clearly Dublin were the hungrier team. We have to go back and look at our performance and the attitude was questionable in a lot of quarters.
“Someone said to me that we had 40 scoring attempts and converted 16 – that’s clearly not good enough.”
Dublin’s captain on the night, Paul Casey, said the team had absorbed the lesson of last summer’s defeat by Cork in the All-Ireland semi-final. “It was tough, but it’s great to get the win because we’ve got two wins under our belts now from our first two League games and you can’t ask for any more than that.
“We learned last year in the All-Ireland semi-final that you have to keep going for the full 75 minutes and thankfully we kept it going there. Towards the end they were clawing us back, but the goals came at crucial times and we got out of it with the win.”
