Foreword

BY JOHN O'LEARY

Dubs goalkeeper, 1980-1997,

double All-Ireland winner

What happened to me will never happen again. I made my senior debut for Dublin in the 1980 Leinster football final. The right place at the right time. I was lucky. I had won a minor All-Ireland the year before and was invited along to a training session at Parnell Park on the Saturday morning before the provincial decider with Offaly. Stephen Rooney, who was an O'Dwyers man like myself, was on the panel as well. He'd played midfield with Brian Mullins in 1974 when Dublin came from nowhere to win the All-Ireland.

Mick O'Brien, a soccer goalie with Athlone Town who was famous for swinging on the crossbar, was knocking around. Mick Kennedy had played in goal in the first two rounds of the championship, but Mick was a corner-back. So I did the training session, took a few kickouts. Thought it went okay. Kevin Heffernan told me to bring my gear the next day. I thought this was great - I'd have the best seat in the house to watch the Leinster final.

On the day of the match, I walked up Clonliffe Road with Tommy Drumm, one of our more senior players at the time. He turned to me and asked if I'd like to be playing. Looking back, Tommy might have had an idea I was starting and wanted to feel me out to see if I was ready. Of course I said, oh yeah, I'd love to. Standard answer. Then in the dressing room, I had the number 1 jersey thrown to me. 'You're in today,' Heffernan said, simple as that. I was Dublin's goalkeeper for the next 18 years.

So I go all the way back to the man himself. Heffo. I played with the greats of the 1970s. I captained the 1995 side that produced so many brilliant servants to the Dublin senior football team, including Pat Gilroy, Jim Gavin and Dessie Farrell - the three men who finally began delivering All-Ireland titles for the capital again after 16 long, barren years.

Look at their day jobs. Pat was a businessman, running his own company. He brought with him structure and organisation. Jim had a career in the army, with all the discipline of the air corps. He got to grips with the team, brought them together, convinced them they were not going to lose. He made them feel like a unit, gave them a culture and an image. It was planning, planning, planning with military precision. Planning for every eventuality. Planning for chaos. Dessie, who is a GAA man to the core, continued where the others left off. They gave us that solid structure, and if you have that, you can bring people on. Not every player who's coming into the squad is at the same level.

The best manager I ever had was Kevin Heffernan. His ability to put his arm around one fella and give the next fella a kick in the arse was exactly what was needed at the time. He could multitask and be flexible. He was a natural diplomat and had an innate ability to bring the players on. I get the sense that Dublin now has a structure filled with people who have those skills.

Over the years that this book covers, there's no getting away from it: Dublin were incredibly lucky with some of the draws we got in big games. I feel really sorry for Mayo in that period. I've got great admiration for Mayo - they just kept coming back. That takes some commitment. It would have sickened a lot of teams. It's a long drive from Castlebar to Croke Park, and I love how the Mayo fans follow their team year after year. They were so, so close, but there was something about the way that Dublin team just kept their heads. Call it resilience or plain old stubbornness, but Dublin got stronger from winning all those close games.

It comes from the coaching, the conversations, the leadership - the setup within the unit that Jim brought in, leaning on his military background - but clearly the lads were putting in a lot of hard work as well. Those early days were known to be tough. Under old regimes, they were flaky against the better teams; they were turned over in games they should have been winning. They didn't have that backbone. Jim and Pat Gilroy brought that in. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall during that time. It must have been such an incredible environment.

I played in 70 championship matches in a row, starting with that Leinster final debut - which we lost, by the way, with Faithful legend Matt Connor's goal giving Offaly a 1-10 to 1-8 win. Bobby Doyle got our goal, I'm sure. That 70-match run was a record, until it was broken by a young man named Stephen Cluxton. I like to joke that I 'discovered' Cluxton when I was a selector under Tommy Carr between 1997 and 2001. Tommy asked me about this young keeper, and I just liked everything about him. It was his attitude, his demeanour, his approach and his temperament. He was good - and I knew he was good. He had a way of 'being there'. I liked the way he behaved in the group.

People say Stephen reinvented goalkeeping, particularly the kickout, but we had a certain kickout strategy as far back as 1995, basic and straightforward though it was. If you look at my first kickout in that 1995 final against Tyrone, I took it short to Keith Galvin and he nearly missed it! In those days, our wing-backs Paul Curran and Mick Deegan would walk in from their positions and if the forward didn't follow them, I'd pop it short; if the forward came with them, I'd knock it over them into space for Paul Clarke or Jim Gavin to run onto from wing-forward.

Cluxton is a phenomenal talent. He's going straight over the top with kickouts. He's going over the middle. He's hitting it over an opponent's head, dropping it in to someone in a little tight spot, areas you wouldn't usually see keepers try to use. He's like a golfer with a short iron, pitching onto a green.

Football is pretty simple: you get the ball, three steps, hop, keep going forward. What we see now is very different. The way they play the game is always evolving. Back in the 1979 minor final, Kevin Barry, an Erin's Isle man, handpassed the ball over the bar for the winning point and provoked the establishment of a rule where you weren't allowed score with a handpass for the next 10 years.

I like the way Dublin are currently motoring, but the juggernaut has to go on. They have been really good at their work since 2011, and now it'll be a new team of fellas in. We were very lucky with the skill we had within that 'golden generation' squad, but there is also a structure in place that allows the individual players to do what they want to do - which is probably not typically the case in a lot of other counties. So, you had a Brogan or a Flynn who were able to play to their strengths and express themselves, as they did over those five or six years.

We tend to get a bit of mud thrown at us in Dublin. Croke Park. Sponsors. Population. Whatever. My attitude was always, if you're hearing that, you're doing something right.

You just keep going, it's only chatter and it never bothered me when I played. Dublin got a fantastic secretary in the recently retired John Costello who put a lot of things in place within the county board, and they had guys like Jim Gavin come in and make the most of it. Everything else that's going on around us helps, absolutely. Dublin haven't hidden behind that. Pat Gilroy has come out and said that we have these structures in place and we went after it from a sponsorship point of view. Jim has said the same, and he said every county should do it. Is it the case that counties are not really looking inwardly, they're looking at it saying 'We can't compete with them' because of the perceived advantages? Look at yourself. It really all starts with yourself.

I'm the answer to a quiz question. Which former Dub played with the fathers of Jack McCaffrey (Noel), the Brogans (Bernard Snr), Con O'Callaghan (Maurice), James McCarthy (John) and, of course, Dean Rock (Barney)? Another old teammate, John Caffrey, has a daughter, Leah, starring for the Dublin ladies' side, who are regular All-Ireland winners themselves.

If I was to go about picking the best 15 from the players I played with and the current generation, I'd have some job on my hands. I more or less played with three generations of Dublin players. You'd have to think Brian Mullins and Brian Fenton would be in midfield. And the likes of Barney Rock and Kieran Duff would be in with a great shout. We'd have a problem at half-back trying to fit in Keith Barr, Jack McCaffrey, Paul Curran, Mick Deegan and James McCarthy, to name just a few. Then in the forwards you've got Anton O'Toole, Bobby Doyle, Paul Clarke. You'd have to look at someone like Ciarán Whelan, who played for ten years and never got an All-Ireland but had a brilliant Dublin career. Eamonn Heery was as tough as it gets at half-back but, like Ciarán, his time with the Dubs fell between the All-Ireland wins of 1983 and 1995. Tommy Carr was similar, as was Noel McCaffrey, who missed 1983 but played in losing finals in 1984 and 1985. Noel's son Jack and daughter Sarah have both gone on to win several...