“There’s no point in not being in the game at half time. You have to last as long as you can.”
Westmeath manager Tom Cribbin isn’t telling himself fairytale stories about what might happen against Dublin on Sunday. He’s never been one to bullshit.
The Lake County prepare to face the All-Ireland champions for a third year running in the Leinster championship and, for a third year in succession, it’s expected that Jim Gavin’s men will march on with relatively little fuss. So the debate circles around the manner in which they should fall on their sword.
They have two options:
- Play defensive football – five syllables that cause involuntary and immediate reactions of projectile vomiting in many circles – and give themselves a chance of staying in the game.
- Or ‘have a go’. Attack Dublin. Play ‘decent football’ and go down the honourable way.
https://twitter.com/Woolberto/status/877830098065514496
There’s not much decent football being played when you’re losing by 27 points.
But a lot of critics of anything conservative don’t see the point in closing up shop and not going for it when the result will be the same. A lot don’t see the logic in not playing conservatively against the most frightening attack when it’s coming for you and you know it’s coming.
Surely limiting their score and keeping yourself competitive for as long as possible guarantees the best chance in this game. Surely it justifies all the bloody training and work you’ve been doing since October for championship football. Surely it justifies having a whole coaching team in the first place.
Surely competing – for however long – is more fun and more sensible than kidding yourself that you can actually take these men on man for man when the reality of that means a foot race back down the field anyway with the like of McCaffrey, McCarthy, Cooper, McMahon, Fenton, MacAuley and Kilkenny. A race you simply cannot win.
On Thursday’s GAA Hour football show, Westmeath boss Tom Cribbin spoke with pure, refreshing honesty about his thoughts on setting up against Dublin and he recalled last year’s Leinster final when they watched a one-point half time deficit with the Dubs disappear without a trace within a minute.
“I thought we had learned enough from the first year [2015] that we could be in the game at half time and be competitive and I thought we had the same number of attacks as Dublin in the first half last year and we missed a few easy chances I thought – but we were under pressure kicking them,” Cribbin explained in a brilliant interview.
“We made a whammy for a particular thing we had really covered well for the previous few weeks. Dublin players, when they’re coming across the end line, every single time they’ll put that ball back across to the edge of the square in the middle of the goals and take a chance.
“The rest of the players know that’s where it’s going to be put when there’s a guy coming across that end line and they’re going to try and get someone to get a fist on it.
“They did that to us last year in the first few minutes when we thought we were really, really focused for the start of the second half because they always come with an onslaught in the third quarter. All of a sudden, there was a goal.
“Then, we tried to move it quick to counterattack it and we kicked it straight to a Dublin player, back of the net and, within 15-20 seconds, you’re six points down when you were already two points down and there’s eight in it now.”
Eight points down and you’re playing defensive football – the questions then come up again. But Cribbin stuck to his guns.
“The players asked me ‘will we just push up or what’ but we stayed defensive because I felt we would’ve been exploited completely and opened up completely at that stage and I didn’t feel that would be good for them,” the Westmeath manager said before responding to criticism for how they set up.
“Talk is cheap. I bet if you sat down with Éamonn Fitzmaurice or Mickey Harte – two of the managers and teams that people probably give the next best chance to – there’s no way they would take Dublin on man for man and just throw caution to the wind. You just couldn’t.
“There’s no team in the country, in their right mind [that would do that]. Look at all the Division One matches, just tell me a team that’s going out to take Dublin on man for man for the full 70 minutes.”
This interview with Cribbin really is worth the listen (it starts at 21:11 below).
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