The minute he said it, you looked up at the screen to do a double-take, and then he said the same thing again.
It was Mick Bohan’s pre-match interview on TG4 and he wasn’t talking about Dublin, Meath or the All-Ireland ladies football final. The Dublin ladies football manager talked instead about the Limerick hurlers, praising their near-perfect performance against Cork in the hurling final and almost immediately, you started to wonder. Were Dublin under-estimating their opponents? Was this the right frame of mind to be bringing into an All-Ireland final?
“Ever since 2017, we’ve gone after the performance,” said Bohan.
“And yeah, envious of Limerick, what a performance out here last weekend. Yeah, from our point of view, that’s the performance we’ve gone after. We’ve got it in bits and parts, but on a day like today, that’s what you’re striving for. I’d love for this crew to achieve that…”
Now there’s a good chance that this performance based motivation can work, and it evidently has done for Dublin in the past, but there’s no denying that it seemed to disregard Meath and what they would bring to the game.
As it turned out, the Dublin ladies were a long way off that perfect performance and speaking on the GAA Hour, Colm Parkinson and Briege Corkery felt that a hint of complacency had entered the Dublin ranks.
“Were Dublin complacent?” asked Parkinson.
“The reason I’m asking is because Mick Bohan was interviewed before the game – and this isn’t hindsight stuff – I remember thinking it as he was talking. Now, he was very gracious after the game, I don’t want to be too critical of him but he started talking about Limerick and Limerick’s perfect performance against Cork and you know, that’s what we’re striving for, a perfect 70 minutes.
“He never talked about what Meath were going to bring, the intensity, the battle, it was all like ‘we’re striving for this kind of perfection’ and I was like you know, is that really what you want to be talking about before an All-Ireland final?”
Meath shook up the world!
Wooly is joined by @SarsRowe and @corkery5 to look back on the ladies football final to beat all others.
– Vikki Wall interview
– Meath game-plan
– Duggan's wonder-goalThe Ladies Football final show 👇
🎧 https://t.co/rq6AYZz3iI 🎧 pic.twitter.com/mrAWzYlL4h
— The GAA Hour (@TheGAAHour) September 6, 2021
From the early stages of Sunday’s game, Corkery noticed a similar degree of complacency in the Dublin players’ body language.
“I do think Dublin were complacent, you could even see it in their play,” said the Cork icon.
“I’m not taking anything from Meath here, but I do think that when Meath got past Dublin, it was like the Dublin girls were shocked when Meath got past them. And then they’d have to be like ‘oh God, they’re gone past me,’ you know? I do feel Dublin were a little bit complacent. Dublin have been very strong over Cork the last few years, you could see Dublin were much stronger than Cork. Maybe that’s what Dublin were going off, when you consider that they haven’t played Meath before.
“I do think that will hurt them (that they were caught out like that) but I do think they’ll bounce back,” she added.
“Even at the end, when Meath were playing down the clock, were Dublin really hunting them down? It just didn’t feel like they were,” concluded Parkinson.
