Dublin won a record seventh straight Leinster championship at Croke Park yesterday as they continue to close in on a third consecutive All-Ireland title.
Jim Gavin, their manager, was characteristically understated after their nine-point win over Kildare in front of 66,734 supporters.
“We’ll certainly celebrate it tonight with our family and friends, that’s for sure,” Gavin said. “And then we’ll move on to the next challenge ahead.”
“I think when the guys look back on their careers and probably for Pat Gilroy, who came before me, and his group of players that are no longer with us, they’ll take some satisfaction today,” he said. “But for the current team it’s about being present in 2017 and provincial titles mean a lot to us.
A devastating combination of youth and experience in attack overwhelmed Kildare, with young star Con O’Callaghan kicking 12 points and veteran Bernard Brogan chipping in with five points from play after coming on as a 24th minute replacement for the black-carded Dean Rock.
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“The way we look at it is, whatever part a player is asked to play, whether that’s finishing a game or starting the game, to me and my management team and to the players themselves it’s pretty irrelevant,” Gavin said.
“They do understand that every player wants to get game time. That’s why they train so hard, to be on the pitch representing the jersey.”
Cian O’Neill, the Kildare manager, said that Eoin Doyle, his captain and centre back, played the game with a broken thumb.
“He’ll be in for surgery tomorrow morning,” O’Neill said. “It’s a measure of the man. There was no way he wasn’t going to be playing today. Eoin broke his thumb last week and he felt he could get through.
“We felt he could get through along with him and he played as much as he could and put in a real stellar performance, considering.
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“There were obviously some parts of his game that he couldn’t execute but I think that was far superseded by the brilliant things he did in marshalling that defence for large periods. It’s most likely he won’t be available in two weeks time but we’ll wait and see.”
O’Neill regretted Kildare’s inability to play to their potential for the full match.
“I just think we’d like to execute better,” he said. “I think a lot of it was down to that. There were times when we did execute well and we caused them some problems. In the last 20 minutes of the first half we outscored them 0-9 to 0-4. That doesn’t happen too often against Dublin. We just couldn’t do it consistently.
“We knew that we would have to play the best game we ever played. Anything less wouldn’t be enough and unfortunately we didn’t quite get there.
“There is no better team in the country than Dublin to punish you on the counterattack. That was their biggest thing, their execution was just ruthless it was the high standard you would expect of champions. Ours was well below par.”