Minutes before Dublin's defining game of the season and Cian O'Sullivan couldn't be sure. From the moment he was helped leave the field after straining his hamstring towards the end of the win against Mayo, he was anxiously watching the hours tick. He had a fortnight. The injury was a slow healer and prone to recurrence. His days revolved around work, ice-baths, light jogging and rehab with the team physios.
“But it was a difficult one because whatever I did would flare up the leg and it would take a few hours to settle down,” O’Sullivan said this week, having survived both the final and the intense wave of celebrations across the city afterwards.
The reinvention of O’Sullivan’s role as a kind of strategic centre-back and sweeper was such a critical part of Dublin’s defensive framework that on the radio and news pages, match predictions in favour of the city team contained the proviso of O’Sullivan being fit to play. He has an unusual facility for adapting smoothly to any defensive task, a versatility which has seen him move houses several times in a Dublin shirt.
But the demands of this role were as subtle as they were vital: his contribution was as much about preventing opposition teams from doing what they wanted and from kicking the ball where they wanted.
“I’ve played everywhere in the backs now and midfield. Centre back was probably my preferred position growing up but being honest, I just love being involved. There was a gap there when we realised that Ger Brennan wasn’t going to make it back from injury and he has been a rock there over the past few years.
Pattern
“So that left a void and they looked to myself and
John Small
to fight it out for that position. And I felt we marshalled that area well enough throughout the year. How I played depended on how the opposition set up. Against Mayo they always had one or two guys dropping back so we could give extra cover to the full back line. But once they decided to push up on us then you had to step up and mark the man. So it came down to how the opposition set up rather than something we tried to force ourselves.”
His presence – right place, right time – dictated the pattern of the season and enhanced the sense of balance and stability in the centre of the Dublin defence. But he just didn’t know if he would make it for the biggest game of the year.
He came through the final training session on Friday. Management cleared him to start the final and on Saturday, relief and anticipation was tempered with the realisation that the injury hadn’t been truly tested.
In the rain on Sunday an half an hour before throw-in, he was working with the physio, tailoring his warm-up to try and stretch and warm the leg.
“It was at the front of my mind. I said to myself that the first couple of balls that came my way I would just do something simple with it, and I grew in confidence after that and completely forgot about it then for the remainder of the game.”
As it happened, the day made a mockery of the most simple of football fundamentals. Catching the ball became a treacherous task. Reading its flight on long passes became a near-impossibility for forwards but held starker fears for defenders. One slip at the wrong time; one fumbled ball and anything could happen. All-Ireland finals are pressure enough without your feet going beneath you and playing with a football that seems coated in Vaseline.
“It was pretty bad,” he laughs.
“And it was probably exacerbated by the fact that at this time of year guys aren’t used to playing in those conditions and they are probably a bit rusty under the wet ball. You could definitely see in the first 10 or 15 minutes that balls were hopping all over the place. Then guys started to get a bit cuter and were able to get to grips a little bit with it. But it made for some heart-stopping moments. It was a bit crazy to see guys sliding all over the place like that.”
Weird bounce
As he speaks, fragments of the afternoon return to O’Sullivan; an everyday ball coming in from outfield and taking a weird bounce off the sodden ground and skating past Rory O’Carroll at an oblique angle right towards where
Kieran Donaghy
happened to be loitering. The afternoon was laden with potential mishaps like that. For defenders, it was a matter of living on wits and nerves and trying to keep your feet.
Even if he had wanted to, O’Sullivan didn’t have time to fret about his injury. The final was too harum-scarum. He came through 61 minutes unscathed and left the field with Dublin leading by four points, the sky darkening and a third All-Ireland in five years beginning to materialise.
It was hardly a coincidence that Kerry produced their only real goal chance after he left the field. It originated from a familiar source: one of those whipped hand-passes from Kieran Donaghy. As the ball travelled towards Killian Young, the Kerry half-back who had ghosted into a position of splendid isolation in front of Stephen Cluxton's goal, O'Sullivan was as helpless as every other Dublin supporter in the world.
“We had numbers back and I think everyone was trying to anticipate a breaking ball rather than looking around to see if anyone needed picking up. But Donaghy won the throw comfortably and Young just kind of snuck around. I could see him tailing off from the pack and nobody noticed. Kieran Donaghy has incredible hands. We see it with Michael Darragh Macauley too; his handling his exceptional. It probably comes from the basketball. But I think there was three points in it then, and thankfully the ball fell out of his hands. Any other day it would probably have ended up in the back of the net.”
It didn't. Dublin won. Oddly, it was only at the final whistle that the victory seemed inevitable. Doubts and questions had travelled with the Dubs all season in a way that must have stung them privately. Their comfortable retention of the league title didn't erase them and if anything the sauntering ease with which they reclaimed the Leinster title served only to raise the volume.
In his captain's speech, Stephen Cluxton recalled the path towards the All-Ireland had started when the squad met a fortnight after that calamitous semi-final defeat to Donegal in August 2014.
It wasn’t so much the fact of that defeat as the nature of it that was so shocking to behold. There was a vague acceptance that Dublin’s faith in their attacking philosophy left their defence potentially vulnerable. But nobody imagined that it might be exploited in such devastating fashion until it was happening.
“They opened us up for a few goal opportunities,” O’Sullivan says of that day. “They got three or whatever it was and they just ran down the heart of our defence. And going into this year it was something we knew we had to address and sharpen up on. You can’t concede that many goals and I think we did quite well this season. We did meet up a few weeks after that Donegal game just to digest the game and put a finger on what went wrong. Then we broke for a couple of months and started back in early January and it has been really full-on.”
Cultural significance
Dublin’s record drew immediate comparison to the 1970s Dublin team, who have acquired a cultural significance that goes beyond their feat of winning three titles in that decade. That may have been why this year’s team were quick to put in context any suggestion that their latest All-Ireland win makes them “equal” to their predecessors.
O’Sullivan was born in 1988 but, like his team-mates, he absorbed the stories and influence of Kevin Heffernan’s most famous side when he was growing up.
"Any Dub, when Gaelic football is mentioned in the county, those guys spring to mind immediately. They did leave a legacy and had some incredible characters who went on to be very successful in their post-football lives. And we are really fortunate that David Hickey is working with us now. There is nobody the players look up to more. He has played rugby professionally and then went on in his professional career and has done so many incredible things in life . . . yeah, we would idolise that group so to be compared to them or mentioned in the same breath . . . that is a fantastic honour for us."
Predictions that Dublin are set to dominate forthcoming All-Ireland summers will come thicker than ever now. O’Sullivan agrees the signs are promising for the side, but the easy assumption that the Dubs just have to turn up to win big honours has begun to grate on him.
"It is a bugbear of mine. I feel it is really overstated. Go back to 2009 and this Dublin team was beaten by 17 points by Kerry in a quarter-final. That is not too long ago. It has just been a very good time for us . . . a purple patch for Dublin over the past few years in players coming through and fantastic management teams. We are all fully aware that that won't last forever. Alan Brogan is often quick to point that he played for 10 years before he got to an All-Ireland final.
“ and yeah, we have a young team. There is no reason why we shouldn’t contest further All-Irelands. But that is not going to come easy . . . there is a lot of hard work and sacrifice going into that.”
Dreaded January sessions
This week, they had the run of the city and enjoyed themselves. The Dublin club championship kicks into gear next week and it won’t be long until the first of the dreaded January sessions come around.
“There is a group there for a few years and we have all got to know one another really well, and there is a great family and team ethos in place at the moment. It has been incredible because the camaraderie and the spirit in the team has been really strong.
“It’s funny, I was thinking there on Sunday evening, that I couldn’t believe how fast the year had gone. It felt like it went by in a flash.”
