Brendan O'Brien
PAUL FLYNN isn't the type to toss and turn over a mere football match – not even an All-Ireland final, it seems – but the Dublin wing-forward banked little or no sleep on the night Donegal's championships dreams were put to bed.
The clock was winding down on the semi-final that afternoon when the 25-year-old felt a pop in his hamstring and the alarm bells didn't stop ringing until the results of a scan at the Santry Sports Clinic the following day revealed nothing but a slight strain.
Or so he says, in any case.
News of the diagnosis hasn't been enough to still the rumour mill and the former Dublin manager Tommy Lyons spoke for a fair few conspiracy theorists last week when he suggested that the problem may be much worse than the word emanating from the official grapevine.
Flynn is clearly exasperated by the whispers and has joked that he may even take to walking around with a sticker on his forehead declaring: 'I'm grand' in an attempt to deflect the inevitable enquiries but he insists his focus on the game itself has been unaffected.
“I’m very good at blocking things out and I do it for every other game. My house would be busy enough and they know the craic. They know to get the hype going when I’m not there. I like to keep things low-key. I’ve my own way of preparing for the game and that won’t change for this game.”
He was nine when Dublin won their last title and, though he played football at the time, his memories of that period have more to do with his niece being born and less with the capture of Sam and the boom, boom, boom that surrounded Jayo.
Even so, he's still a Dub.
More. He's a Dublin footballer and a desire to play Kerry in September is in his blood so, yeah, he's thrilled it's the Kingdom awaiting this Sunday. “I expected it to be Kerry, to be honest with you. They’re the team to beat, year in, year out so you don’t expect them to slip up.”
It's two years since they last met. A quarter-final encounter which Kerry approached via an unconvincing stutter through the back door and Dublin on the back of another of their take-no-prisoners Leinster campaigns which earned them an unfamiliar favouritism in these meetings.
Rarely has hindsight had such a good chuckle at perceived wisdom. Colm Cooper had the ball in Stephen Cluxton's net within 40 seconds and there were 14 points separating Jack O'Connor's lads and Pat Gilroy's “startled earwigs” by the close of business.
“Anything can happen in championship football but we probably learned a lot from that game. Nothing like that has ever happened to us ever since that game, so we’ve moved on as a group and even this year we’ve beaten big teams.
“So, I think we’ve learned a lot from losses like that and the one against Tyrone (at the same stage in 2008). We’re experienced enough now as a group to be able to handle situations like that if they do get an early score or whatever.”
It was results like that which prompted Gilroy to bin the blueprint and start over. Overnight, adjectives like 'swashbuckling' and 'inconsistent' became redundant in their match reports, to be replaced by others such as 'defensive' and 'gritty'.
Guys like Flynn were central to it all both in theory and in practise. A wing-forward for whom dissecting the posts was relegated to the small print in his list of priorities, the man from Fingallians is more representative of this team than Alan or Bernard Brogan.
All of which isn't to say that white flags are off the menu. Flynn has claimed 1-4 in five games this summer with his goal and point against Kildare standing out as the most important contribution in a game that was won and lost by the smallest of margins.
“I said it a few times before, I do what I have to do,” he explained. “The hard work comes first, getting the supply into the full-forward line and linking the play. Then after that, if I get on the end of a few scores, which I have got on this year, it’s a bonus. But if I could give the ball off ten times and we get ten scores from it, I’d be just as happy.”
Taking the pre-match parade will, in itself, be enough to make the Hill smile on Sunday.
Source: http://feeds.examiner.ie/~r/iesportsblog/~3/w4X57YeZHDE/post.aspx
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