This is what they got the gang back together for. Not league matches in Division Two. Not Leinster Championship snoozeathons. Not round-robin exercises in eating your greens. This. An All-Ireland semi-final, a baloobas Croke Park, a kick of a ball in it coming down the stretch. Home.
Dublin outscored Monaghan from the hour mark to the long whistle by 1-5 to 0-1. The scorers were as follows. Brian Fenton. Paul Mannion (a free). Jack McCaffrey. Brian Fenton. Dean Rock (a free). Dean Rock (a goal). Maybe the scoreboard tells a lie. Or maybe when you have all those years in your pocket, you can tell your own truth.
When you try to wrap words around the worth of experience, this is it. Monaghan have had a good year but down that final stretch, they had seven players on the pitch who were playing in their first All-Ireland semi-final. Dublin had none. They brought McCaffrey, Rock and Ciarán Kilkenny off the bench. Monaghan had nothing to match that kind of nous and patience.
“You can’t coach it,” said Dessie Farrell afterwards. “You can’t give it to young fellas. They’re brilliant and they’re full of energy. They want to be involved and they want to be part of it. But there are certain things that life experience teaches you. How to close out big games like that is one of them. We’re fortunate to have that type of experience and depth in the squad.”
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Monaghan had hit all points on the map they would have aimed for beforehand. Job One was always going to be staying in touch during the first half. They did so, going in just a point behind. In truth, they probably should have been ahead – they hit the post three times and Ryan McAnespie butchered a goal chance while the Dubs were without the black-carded Niall Scully. But all in all, they’d have taken being 0-8 to 0-7 down at the break.
Job Two was to see out the 15 minutes after half-time. Everyone remembered Dublin’s vulgar display of power against Mayo after the break in the quarter-final. That bout of extreme ratcheting that revealed a game we were all convinced was coming to the boil to actually be ice cold. If there was any success at all in this game for Monaghan, they had to avoid that fate at least.
[ Dublin v Monaghan: Five key moments from the All-Ireland football semi-finalOpens in new window ]
And they did. Dublin won the throw-in and set about extending their lead but Ryan Wylie forced an overcarry from Colm Basquel. Monaghan steadied down, got up the other end of the pitch and when McAnespie bounced off four Dublin tackles like a sugared-up dodgem, his curled point brought the game level. On 50 minutes, the score was 0-10 to 0-9 – Monaghan had survived the power quarter.
“We targeted the third quarter during the week,” said Vinny Corey. “We knew it was a key time for Dublin and we knew if we got through that third quarter on parity we had a great chance of winning the game and that’s the way it panned out.
“We would have been happy enough with the third quarter. We held firm. We got a few scores of our own. We kept Dublin shut out.”
Job Three was for it to be in the balance on the hour mark. Clock check – 60 minutes. Scoreline – Dublin 0-12 Monaghan 0-12. Not just that but Monaghan had scored the previous two points in a row. They both came from Conor McManus, the first a liquid score from the right on the run, the second a mark after Darren Hughes had won a break under a Monaghan kick-out. If this was his last dance in Croke Park, he went out like Fred Astaire.
The killer for Monaghan was that they couldn’t patch together the bits and pieces they needed for Job Four. Jack McCarron came off the bench to be the man who could get them the scores down the stretch. But that meant taking off Kieran Hughes, which removed a kick-out option for Rory Beggan when he had to go long.
Which, soon enough, became every time. Once Dublin went ahead through a glorious Fenton point off his knees, they catapulted everyone into the Monaghan half and infested Beggan’s routine. Stephen O’Hanlon was done for a marginal touch-on-the-ground decision and Mannion curled it in sumptuously from the left.
[ As it Happened: All-Ireland semi-final - Dublin 1-17 Monaghan 0-13Opens in new window ]
Two-point game. Everybody up – 12 Dubs in the Monaghan half. Beggan left with no choice but to go long, leading to Eoin Murchan pouncing and eventually McCaffrey pushing the lead out to three. Just for kicks, Fenton got the next score too, off a turnover in the Dublin half. So long and thanks for all the fish.
“We came here to win, we came to be in an All-Ireland final,” said a distraught McManus afterwards. “We were exactly where we wanted to be. We managed the third quarter very well – Dublin are famed for pulling away in that quarter and we didn’t let them do that.
“We got it to a stage where we wanted it to be but Dublin showed the class that they have. You don’t win six All-Irelands in a row for nothing. Some of them boys are going for their ninth All-Ireland. That’s the quality they possess.”
It is and it told. In a fortnight, we’ll find out if it’s enough.
