FOR the Dublin-Limerick qualifier in Thurles two weeks ago, Anthony Daly was doing the TV co-commentary on RTE alongside Ger Canning.
Seven minutes before half-time, with Limerick eight points up and cruising, Daly said to Canning: ‘Do Limerick kick on now and bury Dublin? Or do Dublin dig in and get it back to three or four and give themselves a real chance?’
The game was effectively decided in those five minutes. Dublin got it back to within four points at the break. It gave Dublin a chance, which they grabbed with both hands. When Dublin needed to get the first score of the second half, Paul Ryan came out and shot the first five. Dublin had wrestled back momentum and Ryan was the key to maintaining it, nailing 0-12, six from play.
Ryan had obvious motivation.
After being brought on before half-time in the Leinster quarter-final replay against Galway, he was harshly hauled off again before the end. Yet Ryan got another opportunity when Ger Cunningham took a sledgehammer to the starting 15 for Dublin’s first qualifier against Laois.
Seven players came in. Some big names went out; Alan Nolan, Mikey Carton, Shane Durkin, ‘Dotsy’ O’Callaghan, David Treacy. With Cunningham picking players on form, Durkin and Dáire Plunkett came in for the Limerick game.
Anthony Daly was extremely loyal to certain players but Cunningham has tried to put his own stamp on matters and his rotational policy has ruffled feathers. On the week of the Limerick game, Mikey Carton, one of Dublin’s most experienced players, walked away in frustration.
Other players were unhappy with how they’d been treated. There were stories of unrest within the squad and that others were on the verge of walking.
The Limerick victory has bought Cunningham and his project more time before it can be fully judged in its first season.
It was always going to be a big challenge for Cunningham anyway.
After Daly’s six years of setting the bar and transforming the culture of Dublin hurling, the biggest challenge for Cunningham was to come up to that level, or try and surpass that standard.
There was expectation and pressure on Cunningham to try and take Dublin to that next level.
For a start, he was the type of appointment the players wanted after Daly.
Danny Sutcliffe fired up the first flare last September when the players didn’t believe there was somebody within the county qualified to take over from Daly.
“I wish there was a Jim Gavin who had won everything at underage that you could give it to but there isn’t really,” said Sutcliffe.
“It’s either Anthony Daly or higher. You can’t really take a step back.”
Cunningham is a different character and personality to Daly but he fitted a similar coaching profile and shared the same professional mindset of preparation and attention to detail. Cunningham had the ambition and experience to succeed but he still needed to be the right fit for Dublin in the way that Daly ideally was.
The first half of Daly’s career was spent in the same purgatory in Clare that the Dublin players had become accustomed to before he took over.
He could relate to their mentality, identify with their struggle.
Back then though, Dublin needed a manager to try and build on their underage momentum, to progressively establish a strong hurling culture, which would ultimately lead to success.
Daly achieved most of those goals but expectation levels were far higher by the time Cunningham took over.
Dublin had won a League and a Leinster title.
They had been an established Division One team.
Reaching a League semi-final was a great start but the manner in which they blew that game against Cork in April devalued the stock Cunningham had built up during the spring.
Recovering from that disappointment was a challenge before the championship but, from day one, there was any amount of challenges stacking up before Cunningham.
Ten of the players which lost the 2014 All-Ireland quarter-final to Tipperary had featured at the same stage six years earlier. It was inevitable that Cunningham would have to shake up the team but changing that culture was never going to be so easy when so many of the players had been so established under Daly.
Although Dublin were still competitive at underage, the underage production line hadn’t been functioning at the same pace it had been either.
For all the talk about the development of Dublin hurling, 12 of the players that featured against Tipp were from just four clubs – Ballyboden, Kilmacud, Lucan and Cuala.
Cunningham tried to shake it up in different forms.
He tried Carton at full-back and Liam Rushe at full-forward.
Daly had tried the same moves with both players and neither of them worked.
Conal Keaney had also been recast as a half-back but, similar to Rushe, Cunningham also restored him to his natural habitat.
Cunningham’s tactical set up against the breeze in the first half of the Galway replay asked more hard questions of his management.
Some of his decisions on the line that day exacerbated those questions but at least he was trying to mould his own team during the process of transition.
New players were given a chance to establish themselves; Cian O’Callaghan, Chris Crummy, Darragh O’Connell, Plunkett, Shane Barrett, Eamonn Dillon, Niall McMorrow, Cian Boland.
Daly had blooded most of them but many of those players are now the face of Cunningham’s new side.
Eight of the starting team against Limerick didn’t start against Tipperary in last year’s All-Ireland quarter-final.
Nobody is really sure just yet where this team is headed but the Limerick win was significant for a number of reasons. Firstly, it erased many of the crippling doubts which had haunted the team since the Galway replay. Secondly, and more importantly, it’s been a long time since the Dubs won a game coming from eight points behind.
On a new journey and in a year of new starts for Dublin, that is as good a starting point as any ahead of an All-Ireland quarter-final.
