Conor Burke banking on a bounce back with Dublin
Dublin hurler Conor Burke, picured at the announcement that McKvr is the Exclusive Apparel Partner of the Gaelic Players Association (GPA).
By Paul Keane
A feature of the football championship so far has been how teams have suffered punishing defeats, learned from their mistakes and come roaring back with statement wins.
Conor Burke and the Dublin hurlers are hoping to do something similar in their code, and to bounce back from their Leinster final loss with a huge All-Ireland quarter-final performance against Clare this Saturday.
Prior to facing Galway at Croke Park last Saturday week, Dublin hadn't suffered a defeat in the provincial round-robin, winning four games and drawing the other.
Plenty of commentators had them installed as favourites to regain the Leinster title for the first time since 2013.
It didn't go to plan though, the concession of 4-29 to a rampant Galway side forcing Burke, manager Niall Ó Ceallacháin and the rest of the Sky Blues contingent back to the drawing board ahead of the All-Ireland series.
No doubt they've focused heavily on being defensively stronger and stopping the goals going in. They'd only conceded one goal in their previous four games before the provincial final.
"That's obviously a question that we're asking ourselves as well," said Burke of what went wrong. "I think maybe the last day, some of those goals came when we were chasing the game, so we were a little bit more open. But yeah, we do need to be more compact at the back and just use the ball better as well because turnovers are a big source of counter-attacks."
Dublin will try to get it going a little better in attack too. They oozed quality throughout the provincial round-robin, mixing it up beautifully and creating scores with hard runs through the centre or, alternatively, long deliveries down to the likes of John Hetherton.
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It wasn't that they didn't try to do those things against Galway at Croke Park, they just didn't come off as they had been previously.
"It's a big challenge in general, for all teams, how you use the ball, when to go short, when to go long," said wing-back Burke. "And when you say it like that, it sounds easy. But it's not when you're out there on the pitch and you're under pressure.
"There's a lot of factors at play. You're just trying to, I suppose, improve your decision-making and know when to do one or the other."
And that's where the real learning is for a team like Dublin who are trying to get to the very top. It's all about making good decisions under pressure. Ó Ceallacháin can only work on that so much in training - it's all about exposure to pressure situations like the Leinster final and learning to make the right calls when it really matters.
"Ultimately, the more you play at that level, the better your decision-making becomes," agreed Burke. "Because you can often revert to type, or revert to whatever is second nature for you when there's huge intensity put on you. You sometimes just go back to what you know.
"You're obviously trying to train the right things in, week after week, so that when the intensity comes on you, you revert to the positive things you've been trying to do in training. But like I said, it can be easier said than done when there's huge intensity on you in a game and each time you're exposed to that it definitely helps."
Dublin should have learned too from their two games against Clare already this year, in Round 1 of the Allianz League and in the Division 1B final. Both ties ended in narrow wins for the Banner.
"Clare obviously have had a good lead-in time so I'm sure they'll have had plenty of time to prepare," said Burke. "Coming third in Munster gave them the opportunity to rebuild their energy coming into this one, and to work on their preparation."
Conor Burke in action against Conan Boran of Kildare during their Leinster SHC tie. Photo by Sam Barnes/Sportsfile
Burke has been virtually ever present for Dublin this year, starting 16 of their 17 competitive games since the start of the Walsh Cup.
He's enjoyed plenty of success along the way, like the promotion they secured to Division 1B and then the big provincial wins over Galway and Kilkenny. But he wants even more and agreed that the result of Saturday's All-Ireland quarter-final tie will probably frame how they reflect on the entire season. They won't be happy with a mere quarter-final appearance.
"Yeah, exactly, that's the right way to put it, I'd say," said Burke. "The answer is probably that we'll know by the end of the year.
"Because moral victories against Galway and Kilkenny aren't any good to us in the round-robin stage. We wanted to win the Leinster championship and be measured by silverware, not just victories over the course of a year.
"We're obviously improving and getting closer but at the end of the day, a win like that doesn't mean much if there's nothing to show for it at the end of the year."
Burke had a strong opinion too regarding the fact that Dublin haven't historically fared well at FBD Semple Stadium, where they'll play on Saturday. Their last win there was four years ago, in the League against Tipperary.
And when they similarly beat Tipp there in 2019, that was their first win over Tipp in Thurles since 1946.
"I didn't even know that," shrugged Burke. "You sometimes hear those stats that get thrown out but when you're playing you don't really take much heed of it. Because what does a team that was around 50 years ago have to do with our team, you know?
"It's similar to the result against Kilkenny, I think there had been only one victory over Kilkenny in 65-odd years or something like that. It was like, what does that have to do with our group?
"So that's definitely not an element that we're looking into. It's more about just kind of getting, I suppose, our energy right and getting ourselves tactically prepared for Clare, and trying to beat them on the day."
