Ger Brennan said he was delighted with the positive response of his Dublin players after calling them out in public a fortnight ago.
A frustrated Brennan made it clear after Dublin’s Division 1 defeat in Mayo, having already lost to Donegal, that reputations counted for nothing and that nobody’s place on the panel was safe.
Speaking after Saturday evening’s win over Monaghan at Croke Park, Dublin’s first League win under Brennan, the new manager said he probably shouldn’t have criticised his players so publicly and described that as ‘unlike me’.
But he said they responded in the right manner with a gutsy win over Monaghan, coming from three points down late on with a late surge of scoring to win by four.
“The lads worked really hard the last couple of weeks, to be fair,” said Brennan. “Obviously I put it up to them in the post-game chat in Mayo and the response has been great. The work that fellas have put in has been super.”
Asked if he was trying to ‘rattle a few cages’, as his former Dublin colleague James McCarthy suggested last week, Brennan shrugged.
“Well, it was probably unlike me, I shouldn’t have said it in public, possibly, but the lads were forewarned,” said Brennan. “They’re great lads and the response has been great. We had a good few one-on-ones with guys in the couple of days afterwards. It’s a fairly simple chat with them, ‘Where is your head at? Where is your heart at?’
“The work that the fellas put in has been incredible, I’m thrilled with their effort and on the pitch tonight the effort was excellent as well. It was scrappy in a lot of places, certainly in the first half our shot-to-score ratio was about 20-something percent. We were creating an awful lot of chances.
“In the second half I think we got up to the 60 shot-to-score (percentage). We did well on our kick-outs in the first half, did well enough on Monaghan’s kick-outs over the course of the game. Our own kick-outs were poor in the second half and then at times defensively we were quite porous in terms of the amount of turnovers we were giving away.
“I don’t know how many goal chances we had but the hardest one of them was probably Joe Quigley’s, which he scored, which was kind of Roy of the Rovers stuff. Fair play to Joe on his debut. I think the last time he played in Croke Park was cumman na mbunscol so fair play to Joe on scoring a goal like that.”
Quigley was joined by goalkeeper Hugh O’Sullivan and Charlie McMorrow in making his League debut. It brings to 54 the number of players that Brennan has used competitively this year, across the O’Byrne Cup and League.
“The priority is to find more players,” said Brennan. “And the risk versus reward is obviously that it’s a fine line. We got our reward tonight after giving new lads a chance again. That’s the plan we have, we committed to it at the start of the League and we’re going to stick with that.”
Meanwhile, Monaghan manager Gabriel Bannigan said that Ryan McAnespie, who was taken off during the Round 3 tie, suffered a hamstring injury. It’s yet another player who is likely to be unavailable to him for next weekend’s clash with Mayo.
“It’s very frustrating,” said Bannigan of his long injury list. “I brought 16 new players into the panel this year – it looks like we’re going to use them all. The reality is that any team in the country would find that challenging and difficult.”
Bannigan said that he has ‘handed out seven League debuts in three games and another four lads have come off the bench that never played League football for Monaghan before’.
That wasn’t a level of transition he was necessarily expecting this year.
“You want to be blooding these players but you want to be blooding one or two at a time, with lots of experience around them,” said Bannigan. “But we’re having to go deep, we’re having to go deep at the moment. But they’re good lads and they’re making progress.
“If they keep putting the work in that they’re putting in, they’ll keep improving. They’ll benefit from this experience. And look, our luck is bound to change.”
