Silence fell across the land last night as precisely nobody wept for the death of the league semi-final. Dublin and Kerry skipped through Donegal and Roscommon without breaking stride and will face off in the final a fortnight from now, as the worth of getting rid of this stage of the competition was confirmed. They both won by double-digit margins; they both ran their bench long before the end. On a perishing cold day in Croke Park, it's hard to imagine many of 31,324 crowd went home with their hearts warmed.
Dublin pushed their unbeaten run in league and championship to 22 games with a 1-20 to 0-13 win over Donegal.
Jim Gavin's side had 11 scorers, and with Ciarán Kilkenny kicking points from all angles and Bernard Brogan helping himself to 1-2 in the second half alone, from a long way out it was really only a matter of how big a score they would put up.
“I think the last quarter of the game fizzled out a bit, but Donegal do pose a lot of threats,” said Gavin.
“You know that at any stage they could get a run on you and get a goal on you. We know they have a lot to do fitness-wise ahead of the championship and they certainly have one eye on that. We’re just happy from a Dublin perspective to get through that and to play in a national league final.”
Competitive
Afterwards,
Rory Gallagher
confirmed that his side hadn’t had a full training session this week, as it had been set out in advance as a down week ahead of their championship training bloc.
They were competitive enough for the opening half- hour and only trailed by 0-9 to 0-6 three minutes before the break. But once Brogan stroked home his goal a minute after the restart, it was time to pull up stumps.
“We came down to give it our best shot, there’s no doubt about that. But at the end of the day, just because we we’re in a league semi-final didn’t change our preparations overall.
“Once the draw is made you work towards that date and the league semi-final – don’t get me wrong we wanted to perform better than we did – but there wasn’t the same tactical focus as you would do for another game.
“We just met up Thursday and we travelled down. We’d a light kickabout and a stretch and that was it.
“It was definitely harmless enough, I suppose, in the greater scheme of things. It was played at a fairly pedestrian pace even in the first-half, when it was fairly competitive, but look the reality is the last 20 minutes were a non-event.”
As for Kerry, they had an even easier time of it against Roscommon in the first game, lolloping to a 3-15 to 0-13 victory.
Bullied
First half-goals from
Colm Cooper
, Donnchadh Walsh and Darran O’Sullivan put paid to any notion that a bit of hard ground and big pitch would play to the Rossies’ strengths.
As with the Mayo game a fortnight ago, Roscommon found themselves bullied, beasted and brushed aside by a far more experienced outfit.
“I thought maybe we were a little bit in awe of them,” admitted co-manager Fergie O’Donnell. “We may have got a little bit of stage fright. We didn’t make a big issue of it before the game and we didn’t feel it. But when you go in at half-time and the game is over, that’s disappointing, and I certainly didn’t anticipate that.
“We may have surpassed ourselves to get to league semi-final and we’re under no illusions either. There’s been a lot of media talk about us getting here, but I think the Mayo game showed a lot of our shortcomings and we know where we’re at.”
They’re not the only ones. After this, most of the country has a fair idea of where they’re at. And with maybe only Mayo as an exception, it’s nowhere close to Dublin and Kerry.
