Pat Gilroy explains why Dublin's loss to Mayo in 2012 still haunts him

Gilroy admits he took his 'eye off the ball' for the 2012 All-Ireland semi-final

Pat Gilroy admits that he is haunted by Dublin’s 2012 All-Ireland semi-final defeat to Mayo.

The game turned out to be Gilroy’s last in charge of the footballers but he blames himself having taken his “eye off the ball” due to an obsession with Jim McGuinness’s rampaging Donegal side at the time.

Mayo won that semi-final 0-19 to 0-16 after leading by 10 points at one stage before losing the final to Donegal. Gilroy stepped down days later due to work commitments having already lost the services of trusted assistant Mickey Whelan ahead of that campaign.

Gilroy said: “Apart from just the training he was a great man at the game by game and I took my eye off the ball.

“I felt that Donegal were so strong and were doing so much damage to teams that I had an eye on them in terms of the way we wanted to play and I didn’t spend enough time on Mayo.

“I would blame myself very strongly for allowing them get a 10-point lead because I hadn’t put the same focus in,” he told The Hop Ball.

“It was probably the one game over my whole time that I had been… we certainly looked at them and certainly had done a certain amount of homework but me personally, I hadn’t spent enough time on it to stop a situation like that arising because I didn’t see the danger that their forwards did do to us that afternoon so it would be one thing that I would certainly pin on myself.

“It’s where Mickey would have been excellent because he’d have been probing and asking more about them. I had spent a little bit too much time looking at Donegal.

“I had seen them as the real danger that year. It’s something that I would certainly hold  my hand up on that one.”

He continued: “It would be one of the things, looking back on it, on reflection, it was something that I had never done before and I think, to be fair to Jim (Gavin), it was something that he never did in any of his games, it was just one game at a time and up to that point I’d say I could have honestly said that we had treated it that way.”

Going back to his early days in the job, Gilroy admitted he had to tackle the issue of some players getting bigger and better endorsement deals than others.

He explained: “It is a team game and no one is bigger than the team. There is no team where one guy is bigger than the team. That is the way it is.

“One of the things was to confront some of these things because there might have been resentment about certain things and there was.

“It was an underlying thing that was in some people and it was a niggle for some people around it but it would never have been something they spoke about.

“And sometimes just speaking about those things and the people who may have thought were getting more they didn’t think at all that could be a resentment.

“So, just even having those conversations and making people aware because if no one is saying it to you then you might think this is not having any effect on anyone in the team.

“And so getting those conversations and managing them in a way that people felt they were being fairly treated because at the end of the day you wanted people who were doing the work to be rewarded. The best way to reward people is to play them.”

That Mayo game eight years ago wasn’t Gilroy’s last game in charge of a Dublin team, however, as he subsequently managed the hurlers in 2018 before work commitments cropped up again though, in describing that squad, he said that “I never went into a group that was as down as that particular group on themselves”.

“They had just lost belief in themselves, and part of that was the Cuala guys weren't there as well, who would have had a lot of confidence.”

He added: “I think ultimately as a county we should be able to have a successful hurling and football team all the time, without one damaging the other, you know.”