When Dublin won the 2023 All-Ireland football title, the central narrative throughout that summer had been of a band getting back together again for one final gala show, on one last revival tour.
Yet the way Dublin blasted out hits during that championship, signing off the campaign with another headline performance in the All-Ireland final against Kerry in Croke Park suggested that the group was still primed to write and perform more successful albums.
“Win or lose, I don’t get that sense from this group that there will be significant changes and a mass exodus next year,” said former player Mossy Quinn before that 2023 final. “In sport we are quite ageist anyway. Look at the performances of James McCarthy and Mick Fitzsimons this year?
“Do we have enough strength in depth in Dublin to tell those players they’re finished when they reach a certain age? These boys will only worry about the future in the future.”
For Dublin, the only future for that generational squad had always been the now. Another winning performance, another All-Ireland, meant another tour together in 2024.
Yet how many more glorious encores could the group keep performing? How long could the band really stay together?
This day was always inevitable, especially when the greatest team of all time was growing old; ten of the team which started the All-Ireland quarter-final defeat to Galway in June were over 30.
Most of those players are amongst the most decorated in GAA history, outside of a batch of Kerry footballers and Kilkenny hurlers.
McCarthy is one of just three footballers to have won nine All-Ireland medals. Fenton is rightly recognised as probably the greatest midfielder ever. What more had they left to prove?
Speculation is rife that several other senior players may follow McCarthy and Fenton out the door over the coming weeks, but this already feels like a seismic shift, a monumental fork in the road for Dublin football.
It’s rare that two Hall of Fame players from one team would retire within weeks of each other, but the worry of what that may mean for Dublin is exacerbated by the fear that another handful of all-time greats may be about to join them in one fell swoop.
Every great team loses their greatest players over time, and this Dublin has been shedding some of that generational talent now for the last seven-eight years; Bernard Brogan, Philly McMahon, Dean Rock, Jonny Cooper, Rory O’Carroll, Cian O’Sullivan, Paul Flynn, Diarmuid Connolly, Michael Darragh Macauley.
Dublin did lose a raft of big names at the one time after the 2020 All-Ireland final – MacAuley, O’Sullivan and Paddy Andrews retired after the 2020 All-Ireland final, while O’Carroll just slipped away, and Paul Mannion departed at the end of that year too.
Yet none of those five players featured in that final, with O’Carroll, Andrews and O’Sullivan not even making the match-day squad of 26.
They were at the end of their careers, but, more importantly, Dublin were building another team. And their main men were still in their prime; Fenton was Footballer-of-the-Year at the end of that 2020 season for the second time in three years.
And still, Dublin suffered over the following two seasons without some of the players which had made them great. When three of them came back in 2023 – Mannion, Stephen Cluxton and Jack McCaffrey – their return helped reshape Dublin back into the powerful brand they once were.
Having more X-factor players than anyone else used to be the essence of Dublin’s identity. Losing so many of those players over the years was bound to strip away more layers of that aura.
The aura that Dublin created had an invasive quality because it was always a drain on the opposition’s mental energy. The force and real power of what Dublin believed about themselves was inflated in the minds of others. In 2021 and 2022, Dublin couldn’t terrorise the minds of their rivals like they once did. But they were able to exert that psychological authority over the opposition again in 2023.
Their experience and football IQ also assisted in the natural evolution of the team.
More game-changers and more generational players restored Dublin’s powerful image. They looked like the old Dublin again.
Those names were still on board this year and, while a bug did drain the energy of a number of players before the quarter-final, defeat to Galway further underlined the huge mileage on the clock, and how difficult it was for the band to keep banging out new hits.
Now that their two front-men have walked away, their departure has stripped away more layers of Dublin’s old aura. Even more layers again could be peeled away if another raft of players drift away in the coming weeks and months. And, unlike 2023, anyone who goes now won’t be back.
The squad is still stacked with multiple All-Ireland winners who have faced down and overcome some of the biggest challenges imaginable. However, keeping Dublin at the level they now expect – consistently winning All-Irelands – could be their greatest challenges yet.
