By John Harrington

Con O’Callaghan’s remarkable debut season for the Dublin footballers just keeps gathering more and more momentum.

It required a consummate team performance to put Tyrone to the sword so easily in today’s one-sided All-Ireland semi-final, but the 21-year-old’s display still stood out.

Players simply aren’t meant to dominate the big stage in the manner O’Callaghan has so far in his rookie Championship campaign.

He scored a brilliant 1-2 from play and was centrally involved in many more of Dublin’s scores thanks to his ability to win hard ball and use it with a maturity belying his youthful years.

He’s having a remarkable impact on what was already a brilliant Dublin team, but manager Jim Gavin says that doesn’t come as a surprise because he sees O’Callaghan produce quality every day in training.

“Yeah, I think what you see out there on the pitch is what we see in our sessions,” said the Dublin manager after today’s match.

“He's been in good form with his club Cuala, he had a good U-21 campaign, but he'll play his part like the rest of the guys.

“That's probably the team's biggest strength. This set of players, they all want to get game-time. Whether that's the full 70 minutes or seven minutes at the end.

“That's our biggest strength, they all want to play football. There were 10 players today that didn't get game-time, some of them didn't travel on the team bus and it's hardest on them.”

O’Callaghan didn’t just produce an impressive body of work as an attacker today, like the rest of the Dublin forwards he also put in a serious shift as a defender.

One big turn-over just before half-time summed up this work-ethic as Dublin effectively beat Tyrone at their own game by consistently turning the ball over and then counter-attacking at great pace.

O’Callaghan’s first-half goal came from such a moment, and Tyrone manager Mickey Harte felt it was the decisive score of the match because his players were chasing the game thereafter.

Jim Gavin didn’t agree it was quite so pivotal in the outcome of the game though.

“Not from our perspective, really, it's an opportunity that we took,” said Gavin.

“We got some more in the second-half and weren't clincial with them and the next day that won't be good enough.

“We played an All-Ireland Final last year and didn't perform so we've a lot of work to do to try to get that performance in three weeks’ time.”

Dublin now move on to the All-Ireland Final where they will go toe to toe against Mayo for the third time in five years, but the Gavin wasn’t inclined to give his thoughts on that prospect.

“I haven't given any thought to that,” he said. “Our focus this week and for the last number of week was on Tyrone and the challenge that they would bring.

“To that end we were just focusing on trying to get a performance today.”