*Dublin manager Dessie Farrell with Clare boss Colm Collins. Photograph: Gerard O’Neill
DUBLIN senior football manager, Dessie Farrell has said they were not forced to reach for the panic button despite being pushed to the pin of their collar in Saturday’s Allianz National Football league clash with Clare.
Trailing by six points with fifteen minutes to go, Dublin hit seven points without reply to save their blushes and stop Clare from recording a historic victory in Croke Park.
From the bench, Dessie Farrell called upon Niall Scully, Cormac Costelloe, Jack McCaffrey, Colm Basquel and Eoin Murchan who between them have a combined haul of twenty All-Ireland SFC medals.
Of their impact, he outlined, “A bit of experience and pace, there’s an elements of backs to the wall and it being gung-ho but you still need calm heads in the mix there as well, the lads were able to bring that dimension to it”.
With Dean Rock scoring the equaliser and Cormac Costelloe fisting over the equaliser, their maturity shone through. “That experience is always going to be important, particularly when it’s in the melting pot as it was in that stage, it’s great to be able to call on those wise heads”.
Farrell said the introduction of the substitutes was not them pushing a panic button as the pressure piled on. “It was definitely our intention to get them time, Jack was coming back from a long layoff and we’re trying to manage his load and volume carefully. Eoin Murchan was coming back from injury, he just got cleared this week so we were keen to get him in the mix”.
When the pressure was mounting, he remained confident that Dublin would leave Jones Rd with the win in the bag. “I knew if we could keep plugging away coming down the last three or four minutes, the key for us was not to give away a score because that may have made the bridge too difficult to cross, as long as we didn’t we were still in with a shout”.
He acknowledged that Clare left them in a difficult position. “Happy to get the victory, it definitely did look like we were in bother for periods and a strong finish in the last quarter we were much better and pipped Clare in the end, they’d be very disappointed they didn’t get something out of the game. It was good to see that we were very clinical in the last and we pushed on, we were able to dig it out when it mattered most”.
Farrell added, “Happy to have got over the line and got two points, the lads showed good character coming down the stretch there, there’s always going to be problems and stuff to sort out, this thing is never linear, making progress is never on the one trajectory it can often be one step forward or two steps back, it’s in the steps back that get the most to learn and take from it, hopefully you can frog leap back to where you were and add a little bit to. It’s about active learning for us and trying to take what we can from each performance and make the next one better”.
“We seemed to be in relative control for the first half, there was a strong breeze there but we would have been happy enough with how we operated for maybe thirty five minutes. Some of the shooting efficiency wasn’t great in the first half and decisions around shot taking whatever, the goal was a killer, an error at the back and they tagged on a point just before half-time, that wasn’t what we would have wanted having done reasonably well against a stiff breeze”.
An All-Ireland SFC winner in 1995, Dessie felt Clare had been unlucky not to collect wins against Meath and Kildare already in the campaign. “Clare won’t be a renowned football stronghold but having studied them in the previous games they have been very unlucky not to get more points on the board in terms of their Meath and Kildare games, we knew it was going to be very competitive and it turned out to be that way. They are great learning experiences for us and particularly with so many younger lads in the mix as well, we’ll look forward to the next one, a big clash against Derry who have been very impressive last year and again this year to date”.
How big the gap is between Division 1 and Division 2 is hard to gauge, he admitted. “It’s difficult to know, it looks like highly competitive up there (Division 1) and the intensity is what it is, it’s visible on TV and that type of thing, we’ve had two good games whether the quality is the same and the intensity that remains to be seen but a lot will become more clear as the summer approaches”.
