Listen, the All-Star team is actually pretty good and, either way, somebody is always going to complain about something. So here goes.
Cian O’Sullivan’s absence from the 2016 Football Team of the Year is one of the biggest problems with the selection process.
Dublin cruised through Leinster again, they exacted revenge on Donegal and their new system took the plaudits -a system in which their centre back is integral. They beat Kerry and Mayo in three classics en route to yet another All-Ireland success and, all the while, the same question was being posed: How do you occupy Cian O’Sullivan?
The Kilmacud native was playing his football in second gear and, Christ, his second gear was cruising past everyone else’s sixth. More often than not, he was a free man. He doubled up, he acted as a sweeper, cut out ball at his leisure and launched attacks again with the freedom he was afforded. He was the reason Jim Gavin had transformed Dublin so quickly and why they would no longer be caught out.
It seems though that the freedom he was often afforded was his biggest downfall. In a paint-by-numbers All-Star selection process, it’s easy to dismiss a centre back like O’Sullivan and say he had nothing to do all year, it wasn’t an ‘orthodox’ position or that he did indeed get it too easy.
Don’t ask how on earth it’s O’Sullivan’s fault that Dublin played six backs and six forwards and, if teams dropped a man off, he didn’t follow, but it seems to be what has done him in the end in the individual awards. Don’t bother asking either why, if it was his fault that he set out to play as a sweeper, it would even matter anyway.
O’Sullivan was by far and away in the top three best half backs in the country this year but he has been overlooked.
The only conclusion you can draw is that he didn’t fit the number 6 jersey as easily as someone else might have and, in a room full of a lot of voices and opinions, that’s an easy trend to fall into.
“There’s plenty of detail floating around but there is also a major element of the conversations you have with your dad about football now,” Second Captains’ Ciaran Murphy used to be on the All-Star selection panel and he told us how it worked.
“Things like, ‘Sure it’s all a mess anyway and I much preferred it when I could choose between James McCartan and Bernie Flynn for the number 13 jersey. If Flynn scored one more point, then he gets the All-Star and McCartan doesn’t’.
“In 2012, Mark McHugh had revolutionised football but it was like where do you play him on the team? He wore number 12, he was a sweeper, he played everywhere and in the end he won the All-Star at number 12.
“But I do remember there being this kind of fevered debate, like ‘why are we picking all these Donegal backs? They all have so much help’. That generation gap does exist.”
So, instead, they went with Mayo’s Colm Boyle.
Boyle’s a fine defender, Mayo had a good year, but their centre half back was not ahead of Cian O’Sullivan.
For a start, in Mayo’s last six championship games, Boyle was brought off in five of them.
- Kildare in the 52nd minute (black card).
- Westmeath in the 52nd minute.
- Tyrone in the 58th minute.
- Tipperary in the 67th minute.
- Dublin (first game) in the 58th minute.
A lot of those were down to being booked and what have you but in the two tightest games on that list, the ones that were either separated by a point or not separated at all, Boyle missed 24 minutes of normal time and whatever else of injury time that was left over.
Cian O’Sullivan was overlooked for Footballer of the Year last season and now he’s being overlooked for a place on the Team of the Year.
He’s the one we talk about before and after every Dublin game and we cry that he’s getting it too easy because he’s playing brilliantly and doing it at a canter. The fact that he’s playing brilliantly is all that should matter in an All-Star selection. Who he is or isn’t marking doesn’t come into it.
O’Sullivan is proving with each passing campaign that he is one of the most complete centre backs this game has ever seen. But he isn’t even recognised for 2016 now because people presumably didn’t recognise what it was exactly he was doing. Or who he was marking at least.
You can’t put a free man in the All-Star team. It doesn’t matter if he’s been the best player.
Colm O’Rourke and Pauric Mahony join Colm Parkinson on a packed GAA Hour that includes Dick Clerkin appreciation and Sean Cavanagh envy. Subscribe here on iTunes.
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