THE
INIMITABLE Matt Treacy tackles Ciarán Kearney over his column in the
May issue of An Phoblacht.

THE
REAL MEASURE of the Dublin’s
footballers’ recent
success is not the fact that they’ve
won two All-Irelands, two national leagues
and eight of the last nine Leinster championships but the fact that
they have reignited the irrational hatred of the Dubs that lurks in
the murkier depths of the Irish psyche.

Ciarán
Kearney seems to share that view and — like most of those most antipathetic to Dublin
— comes from a county that has enjoyed
little success over the years. The more prestigious football counties
(Dublin’s main
rivals like Meath and Kerry, and more recently Mayo and Cork)
tend not to take it all so personally and do not
subscribe to bizarre conspiracy theories regarding why other teams
are doing well when they are not!

In
fairness, Ciarán does not confine his
condemnation of other teams to Dublin. Mayo are also seemingly
masters of the ‘dark arts’,
as are Donegal, who he accuses not only of
manipulating the new rules (not very
successfully it would seem) and, even more
sinisterly, videoing opposition players!
Why did Mickey Harte not think of that one? Or Heffo or Mick O’Dwyer?

And
there are apparently Kerry people who call Derry ‘Londonderry’
and Dublin Gaelscoil
kids who sing “You’ll
never beat the Irish” when playing kids
from the North. All part of the
partitionist conspiracy, apparently
— unlike the fine upstanding Gaels from Derry on
the Hill last Sunday singing “Take it
down from the mast, Irish traitors.”
In their Scottish soccer jerseys, drinking their
cans of cider. We got a great laugh out of them in fairness.

Dublin
have other unfair advantages beside the rules, the referees, the
weather and the alignment of the planets which are studied closely
when the Illuminati of Bavaria plot Dublin fixtures. Among them
apparently are “limitless financial
resources” and a “massive
panel”.

Well
let us take the second point first.

All
inter-county panels are of the same size.
Which is why you do not see lads wearing number 47 appear off the
bench. Dublin does obviously have a bigger population to pick from
but on match days there are 15 Dubs on the pitch,
same as everyone else, and five subs on the bench. Granted it might
appear more when the other team have all their players behind their
own 21-yard line. Tactics,
I believe that is.

There
are no limitless financial resources. Dublin GAA is a vast operation
and it costs a lot of money to run. The vast bulk of that is raised
by individual clubs and by the county teams drawing big attendances.
Like all other counties, Dublin gets money from central funds, per
capita and pro rata. No more than any other county.

I
do accept that Seán Cavanagh was unfairly
targeted, ironically by a fellow Ulsterman,
Joe Brolly (who like most Derry people I
know abhors Tyrone) in the debate over
cynicism. What Cavanagh did in dragging down Conor MacManus of
Monaghan was certainly a foul and deserved to be punished but very
few players would not have done what he did so as to
prevent a goal.

And,
yes, Dublin players were guilty of impeding Mayo
players when they were out on their feet in the final minutes of last
year’s final,
playing with two concussed players on the pitch who had obviously
punched themselves in the head. The black card is designed to deal
with the deliberate impeding of players and
as such seems to me to be working quite effectively.

This
year’s league
has seen some excellent high-scoring
matches and allowed the more skilful teams to express themselves.

However,
there remains aspects of cynical play which are not being detected
and punished, mainly because they take place off the ball and behind
the referee’s
back. Players are being punched, pinched, spat at, goaded about dead
relatives and so on. Ask the Gooch and Mattie Forde about that.
Wasn’t Corkmen
or Dubs at that. Indeed, it was a feature
of one of the Dublin matches which Ciarán
refers to, and it wasn’t Dublin players who
were at it. Perhaps all of that is more manly than throwing a dig?

Added
to that is time-wasting, which again has been a feature of matches
where Dublin and other of the more football-oriented
teams have gotten a run on opposition defences. Suddenly lads
discover life-threatening injuries that
require rolling about in agony and urgent medical attention. In the
Dublin/Derry match at Celtic Park, Derry
managed to run down the clock by nearly five minutes after a Dublin
point. That sort of thing needs to be addressed although,
in fairness, Stanislavsky himself, were he
a ref, would have to admire some of the excellence of the acting
involved.

So
let us hope that all teams embrace the new dispensation that will
promote good football rather than rugby league. And each person
behind their own county, no matter how poor they are.

After
all, they can still bask in the reflected glory of the likes of
Tyrone and Monaghan. ☺