By John Harrington

Kevin McManamon paid tribute to 'absolute legend' Dean Rock after his team-mate clinched victory for Dublin in today's All-Ireland SFC Final by landing an injury-time free.

“I have unbelievable respect for the amount of practice he does,” said McManamon after the game.

“I don’t think I would have wanted anyone else in that position with the game on the line and a minute to go. He’s just a legend with the amount of practice he does and how cool he is under pressure and I’m delighted.

“He took a big hit in the League final against Kerry. He took that on his own shoulders and it hit him pretty hard so it’s a nice little twist that he got the winner today. He’s an absolute legend, so fair play to him.”

It was a cruel way for Mayo to lose the match at the death, and McManamon said it’s a mark of the respect that Dublin have for the Connacht team that they prepared so diligently for the match.

“I’ve got absolute massive, massive respect for the Mayo team,” said McManamon.

“They’ve got some legends, big men and big leaders and their resilience can’t be questioned. The only way we can respect them is by giving them every single thing that we have and we gave them everything we had today - everything.

“Everything in preparation, everything on the field in terms of preparation and that’s how we show that we respect them.”

Introduced at the start of the second-half, McManamon scored a fine point and brought a lot more thrust to the Dublin attack with his direct running.

“Well, we only scored five points in the first half, which wouldn’t be our standards,” he said.

“We weren’t getting enough penetration, territory, we needed to get more inside. They were getting a lot of bodies back and maybe that’s something we didn’t plan for. We just changed it a small bit, but I won’t be going too much into our tactical twists.

“It’s a cool place to be where you’re able to watch in the first half. You can spot what we had planned to do and what we were doing - there was a big gap there."

In a game of find margins, Dublin’s bench was decisive, and McManamon felt the contribution of fellow substitute Diarmuid Connolly was especially key.

“Maybe it’s something the guys (management) were trying to hold back - they’ve spoken before about finishing with a strong team as well as starting with a strong team,” he said.

“I’m not 100 per cent sure, but we would have felt that there’s no point in having talent on the bench if you’re not going to bring intelligence and energy onto the park.

“Certainly, that’s what we did. Diarmuid was really cool under pressure today, there were a couple of times he held up the ball really well and he won the free for Dean at the end which was a great response to the wide he hit just before that.

“That’s what Diarmuid brings and he hasn’t done that role for us before. There were probably question marks over whether he could do it and of course, don’t doubt the man.

“He really controlled the game when he got on the ball. Huge respect for Diarmuid.”