Dublin’s Con-undrum. The deflationary impact on the county’s supporters of the news that Con O’Callaghan would not line out was testament to the captain’s importance to his team.
Official confirmation of this state of affairs had emerged in the aftermath of the previous match he had missed in Croke Park, the defeat by Armagh when the wildness of the shooting, 18 wides, prompted a not so coded reaction from manager Dessie Farrell: “ ... one or two players that we needed something from, we needed a score or two from, just they never came from us and the gap was always too big.”
Two weeks later, O’Callaghan was a late addition to the team to play Derry. The problem was a hamstring injury picked up against Galway in the vital group win in Salthill. After the narrow victory, Farrell admitted the player’s inclusion had been a bit of a gamble.
“Yeah, you’re never sure. We toyed with the idea maybe of holding him and keeping him for impact. But the risk with a player who’s been injured and keeping him is that you use a sub and then he goes down and you have to use another sub, so we said we’d go Con from the start in the finish up and just delighted he was able to get through the game.”
Despite this full match and 0-5 scored, there were clearly concerns about his actual fitness.
Farrell had a decision to make on Saturday. Could Dublin navigate the challenge of Cork without their key leader and attacking presence? He was completely aware of the pitfalls of being seen to take opponents lightly by keeping O’Callaghan under wraps.
“Yeah, that was the plan. It’s not to say that we knew this wouldn’t be a tight affair but we were just going to hope that we had enough. There were conversations with the coaches with a couple of minutes to go. We just decided to hold on. If it was a little bit tighter, I think you would have seen him come in for sure, yeah.
“We took the decision not to bring him on there. We sort of run the gauntlet on it a little bit for the last 10 minutes or so. Thankfully, that decision worked out, and we gave him an extra seven days to recover, and he should be good for the next day.”
If ‘should be good for the next day’ doesn’t sound like a ringing declaration, the decision at least gives the player another week for recovery. Dublin will know their All-Ireland quarter-final opponents on Monday when the draw is made shortly after 8.30am on Morning Ireland.
The teams in the other pot are Armagh, Meath, Monaghan and Tyrone. As they met in the group stages, Dublin are protected from Armagh but can draw any of the other three. Meath have already defeated them in this year’s Leinster semi-final.
