By John Harrington

Dublin footballer Philly McMahon says team manager Jim Gavin is too smart to panic about their defeat to Kerry in the Allianz Football League Final.

The one-point loss brought their 36-match unbeaten run in League and Championship to an end, but McMahon doesn’t think it’s a cause for major alarm in the Dublin camp.

“It’s not the end of the world,” said McMahon at the launch of the John West national Féile competitions yesterday.

“We’re not thinking that because we lost that game, let’s throw everything into this. We’ve been doing it all along.

“Old school managers would go, 'We lost. Let’s blame fitness and run the legs off these. Or get them batin’ each other in training'. It’s not about that.

“If we didn’t concede scores and our conversion rate was better, we wouldn’t be in the situation. So why would we change it? Why would management say, 'let’s change the way our schedule is because we lost that game’?

“Management are smarter than that. We know as players these little things that we need to be better at. The competition will get higher and higher with the amount of players blooded through the league campaign.”

The League Final followed the same pattern as many of Dublin’s earlier matches in the competition.

They fell behind and launched a comeback in the second-half, but unlike on previous occasions this one wasn’t a successful one.

 

It seemed as though in this League campaign Dublin could only play to their potential if they were faced by adversity, but McMahon has no easy answers as to why that was the case.

“It’s hard to put your finger on it,” he says. If I had the answer, we’d do it. But I just don’t have the answer for it. It’s hard.

“We intend on going out and playing consistently. We say it to each other. But we just didn’t really get that in the League and yet we still nearly won it.

“A lot of people come up to you and say ‘it’s great that you’ve lost’ and now you’re going to win the whole lot but they’re negative words. We’ve got to act now.

“The more important thing is to get the small things done now. And put them together as a group and see how much we can do individually to get collectively better.”

McMahon is confident the Dublin panel will react in that sort of positive manner to the League defeat and tackle their bid for a third All-Ireland title in a row with a renewed vigour.

“I’m sure there will be a bit more hunger there,” he says. “That’s not to say we weren’t hungry. But it’s just that…all along I’ve certainly been saying that the gap is closer than most people say it is.

“That just showed it. Your mindset is still the same. You’re going to try and win every game and try and get performances every time.

“But I just think that shows that it is really close. That we need to go a little bit further in what we’re doing in all aspects of the game.

“And to win an All-Ireland, you can’t go out and think you’re going to win by a point. You have to go out and think you’re going to win by four or five points so if you fall short, you win by a point.”

McMahon is determined to raise his own game to a new level in the upcoming Championship, but insists that motivation is not any greater now than it would have been before the League Final defeat.

“It wouldn't have been because we lost against Kerry, it would have been more so that I wanted to get ahead of where I was last year,” he says.

“Small parts of my game, physically I want to be in better shape, I want to increase my fitness. I just want to get ahead of where I was last year.

“I read Paul O'Connell's book and at the start of it he said he's always trying to chase that fitness he had some year that he felt unbelievably fit and for the rest of his career he tried to chase that.

“I was thinking about that the last couple of months and I'd always love to ask him did he ever think in his head that he was that fit? Instead of chasing it physically, did he ever think he was the fittest?

“I don't want to be chasing that same year, I want to be chasing a new year. I think that's probably where he was having a fault in his head, that he was trying to get back to that year, but he wasn't playing the same players the following year or the previous years.

“Everything changes. Who he's playing, who he's marking, tactics, who he's playing with. So if you're trying to chase that, you're not going to get it.

“I want to change my mindset to feeling that I'm ahead of where I was last year and then physically that'll all come after that.”

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