Dublin by Neil Cotter

Author:Neil Cotter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781844884322
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-07-24T16:00:00+00:00

8. The Circle

The search for a successor to Tommy Lyons took more than three months and was marked as usual by suspicion, indecision and farce.

Whenever a vacancy arose, the name of Brian Mullins was invariably mentioned. The St Vincent’s clubman was one of the greatest players to ever pull on a jersey. He claimed his fourth All-Ireland in 1983 after a near-fatal car accident had put him out for the guts of two years. He returned a shadow of the gargantuan player he had been, but driven by a ferocious desire that more than made up for the physical decline.

Shortly after Lyons quit, Mullins met with the county board to discuss taking over. He was forceful, perhaps too forceful. He outlined a vision for Dublin football that might have spooked some of the decision-makers. Mullins waited for three months to sign the papers, the same length of time he’d spent in hospital in early 1981 recovering from a shattered leg. While Mullins waited, John Bailey approached Mick O’Dwyer, meeting the Kerry legend in the K Club Hotel to offer him the job. O’Dwyer, at that time the manager of Laois, accepted the invitation and plans were in place to establish his backroom team. News of his impending appointment leaked, and when the reaction made it apparent that he would forever be working against tradition and the intolerance of former players, he turned it down. In a time of mixed messages and communication problems, Mullins’s demand that Dublin’s media affairs be handled by a PR firm was quite apt.

Paul ‘Pillar’ Caffrey was a man who operated largely in the shadows of the inter-county scene. He had played a bit with Dublin in the 1980s but was best known at the end of 2004 as the garda JLO (junior liaison officer) who had led his club Na Fianna to an All-Ireland club final in 2000 and for his cameo as boss in 2002 when Tommy Lyons suffered his health scare before the All-Ireland quarter-final against Donegal. Caffrey had been an able assistant to Lyons, working largely on Dublin’s defensive drills, quietly and efficiently in the manner of a coach who knew his place in the pecking order.

In November 2004, following O’Dwyer’s rebuff, Pillar was invited to put together his team to take Dublin forward. It was, after the dalliance with Micko, a conservative appointment. Some of the squad were consulted – unofficially – prior to the appointment, and were thought to be lukewarm at best. He had worked with those players for three mixed years, had watched his relationship with the Na Fianna players deteriorate somewhat in and around 2003 when they felt he wasn’t pushing their cause for selection. But it took just one meeting for him to change the minds of the squad.

‘Funny, when I heard Pillar got the job, myself anyway and a lot of the lads thought, “Aw, for Jesus’ sake, this is going to be the same again now,” ’ says Shane Ryan. ‘He was doing his job as a selector and backing up Tommy in everything.

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