Roscommon breaking the wrong records
Occasionally there is something to be said for watching a game on TV. If tuning in to Dublin’s ritual disembowelment of Roscommon on Saturday night wouldn’t exactly pass for entertainment in most cultures, it was at least possible to pick up a thing or two from the narrow focus provided by a camera lens that you might have overlooked sitting in the stadium.
It was striking, for example, that any time a Dublin took possession, at least one figure in blue would arrive running in from the left-hand side of the screen (or the right-hand side when they were playing into the Hill in the second half). We scarcely need telling that Dublin’s high-octane game is built on support runners, of course. But it was nonetheless interesting to watch figure after figure appear from off-screen, a conveyor belt that never let up.
It was a fun exercise to count the seconds between a Dub taking the ball in the half-back line or midfield and the appearance of a teammate outrider materialise at full pelt from behind him. You barely got past one; you never got past two. Watch out for it the next time you catch a Dublin game on TV.
[As a quick aside, surely the next development in TV coverage of football and hurling has to be a Kick-outCam/Puck-outCam. The number of restarts we see on screen now is virtually zero because goalkeepers are so quick on the draw they have the ball away while the replay of the previous score is being shown. Surely it can’t be beyond the wit/technology of man to split the screen showing the replay on one side and the restart on the other? Why wouldn’t this work? TV professionals, please do feel free to get in touch and explain the flaw in this line of thinking.]
Anyway, the Rossies. It has got bad in a hurry for Kevin McStay’s side. You knew they were in trouble on Saturday night when, after they’d won a few kick-outs and got in for a couple of goal chances, you thought to yourself that they were actually doing pretty well - and then you looked at the score and it was 1-8 to 0-3 with a quarter of an hour gone. It only got uglier from there.
The monstrous score Dublin put up was obviously a function of Roscommon giving up after a while but all the same, the numbers McStay’s side are conceding have strayed into historic territory this spring. Not only have they to worst defensive record in the country after six games, they have the worst concession rate of any team in any division at this point in the past three leagues.
You have to go all the way back to Carlow in Division Four in 2014 to find a team that had conceded more after six games than Roscommon’s 6-118. Carlow coughed up 11-111 in their first six games that year, which was the first after the introduction of the black card and has passed into history as an anomaly in scoring terms.
This is how bad Roscommon’s defending has been - they have a worse defensive record now after six games than any team over the past three years had after seven. Only in that free scoring spring of 2014 did any team concede more across the league as a whole than the Rossies have with one game to go. After they play Cavan on Sunday, they will range up into view of 2014’s Kildare (10-113), Westmeath (10-125) and Carlow (12-120).
Plenty to work on ahead of the summer. No prizes for identifying the starting point.
Is there a Leinster awakening stirring in Dublin’s shadows?
Early days but we shouldn’t dismiss the possibility that some of the Leinster football counties might just be getting their act together. Come summer, there’s obviously no real danger of Dublin missing out on a seventh provincial championship in a row but even if they are still some way off in the distance, everyone else has to start somewhere. This league could feasibly be the first stirrings.
For the first time since Jim Gavin began his reign as Dublin manager, at least four Leinster counties will be promoted. If Meath beat Clare on Sunday and Kildare do them a favour by beating Galway, that will make it five out of the six promotion spots across the league going to Leinster teams. Even if Meath don't make it, the downward trend that has pertained since the start of the Gavin era will at last be turned around.
Over the four completed leagues since 2013, there have been 24 promotion places available. Only seven have been claimed by Leinster counties, as compared to 11 for teams from Ulster. Four promotions went to Munster counties, two to teams from Connacht.
As for the other end of the table, the figures are even more damning. Of the 24 relegations since 2013, Leinster teams have gone down 13 times. Ulster sides have seen the drop eight times, with two for Munster and one for Connacht. Either one or two of Offaly, Laois and Longford will drop to Division Four after Sunday’s games but otherwise, nobody is in danger.
League is league and maybe none of this amounts to a hill of beans. But the graph was going in one direction and now it’s going in another, at least for this year. If and when the Leinster Championship becomes a going concern again, this league might be pinpointed as the place it started to turn around.
