Dublin legend explains side effect of his side’s awful shooting stats

An interesting take.

The main takeaway, from a Dublin point of view, following their 0-19 to 0-24 loss to Armagh at the weekend, was the 17 wides hit by the Sky Blues.

After a great win against Galway the previous week, it was a humbling experience for Dessie Farrell's men.

It now leaves them in a perilous position in what has been described as this year's All-Ireland group of death, and face Derry in two weeks in what could turn out to be a winner-takes-all.

The big score put on by the Orchard County will also worry the Dubs, and ex-player, Philly McMahon, has pointed out how that aforementioned shooting stat may have had an impact on their defence.

Speaking on the Indo podcast, he said: "Dublin, for some reason, when they're losing games, and again it probably is an obvious thing, is their leaders are underperforming.

"When you have Con, Kilkenny, Howard, Bugler, Scully to an extent, and Costello, when you see those boys shooting the scores that they can, it reverberates around to the younger lads and has a huge impact on the defence.

"I haven't seen Dublin this year been really, really good defensively with them not playing well."

After the game, boss Dessie Farrell was highly critical of his side after being penalised three times for breaking the new 4/3 rule.

He said: "Look, it just shouldn’t be happening. Whether they’re marginal calls or not, we shouldn’t be putting ourselves in that position. Definitely, it’s a conversation that was being had earlier in the league, for sure, and everyone was learning and trying to adapt at that stage.

“At this point in time, it should be embedded. Whatever about getting caught on one because of the ebb and flow of the game, or a chase back and a player is out of position, there’s an awareness challenge around that at some particular times. But to get it done for three and then we’d have a breach on the fielding and the mark in the first half as well, which costs us another two points.

“So I think at five points in total, that costs us, which is just at this stage of the competition against a position like we’re playing, it’s just not good enough. We’ll be having a serious conversation about that.”