Ger Brennan may or may not be familiar with the work of the Honourable Gentleman for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North but he will increasingly be getting the gist of it. In May 2010, Liam Byrne MP was the outgoing chief secretary of the treasury in the UK as Labour lost power, a job in which his last act was to leave a letter for his incoming Tory counterpart.
“Dear Chief Secretary, I’m afraid there is no money,” wrote Byrne. “Kind regards – and good luck! Liam.”
Any chance Dessie Farrell left something similar for Brennan over the winter? Maybe a small note in the drawer of a desk in Parnell Park, telling the new Dublin football manager he’s afraid there are no players? A gallows admission that somehow, in a city of endless resources, the most vital one of all has dried up.
Feels unlikely, in fairness. Dessie was no stranger to a bit of hangdog humour here and there – neither, for that matter, is his successor. But they’d both rail against the idea that Dublin are suddenly short of the required talent to compete. If you allow transition talk to hang around long enough, it starts to sound like surrender.
Maybe that, as much as anything, was behind Brennan’s press conference performance after the recent defeat to Mayo. Once he started talking publicly about cutting experienced players, he was essentially sending out two messages, separate but not unconnected. One, things have become too comfortable among the Dublin playing staff. And two, he reckons there’s no shortage of candidates to upend that comfort.
“I think he was mostly doing what any good manager would try to do,” says Paul Flynn, one of the slew of ex-Dublin players Brennan got in to manage a team when he ran trials over the winter. “People forget that Pat Gilroy did more or less the same thing when he took over from Pillar Caffrey. Ger isn’t the same guy as Giller but they’re the same club and he’d be built a similar way. If there’s a cultural change needed, it won’t cost him a thought.”
That change of some sort is needed isn’t really up for debate. Dublin have gone out before the semi-final time in both of the past two All-Irelands, having not missed one since 2009. They’ve come away from the All Stars empty handed for the past two years in a row as well – you have to go as far back as 2004/’05 for the last time that happened. One lost year can happen to any team. Two of them back-to-back means it’s time for a new broom.
Where to start sweeping is the question. Brennan didn’t specifically say Dublin’s cohort of All-Ireland winners was in the firing line but he didn’t fall far short of doing so. It felt significant that when asked about hunger, the Dublin manager cited Aidan O’Shea’s lack of a Celtic Cross and wondered would he still be on the go if Mayo had won one. Clearly, past performance is not being taken as a guarantee of future returns.
‘I would suggest that it’s some of our fellas who have been around the block… there’ll be a few tough decisions to be made…’
‘It’s probably decision time for a couple of guys, in terms of what they want to do…’@DubGAAOfficial boss Ger Brennan indicates some serious… pic.twitter.com/oYsHaSOmTX
— Off The Ball (@offtheball) February 1, 2026
For what it’s worth, the 26-man squad Brennan brought to Castlebar contained 11 of the 2023 All-Ireland final panel, plus Sean Bugler from the 2020 team. That’s without counting the likes of Colm Basquel, Lee Gannon, Tom Lahiff, Cian Murphy and Ross McGarry, all of whom have All-Ireland medals too. Throw it all in the mix and Brennan has 17 All-Ireland winners in the running for a place in his squad.
Of those, he’s obviously not talking about getting rid of Con O’Callaghan or Ciarán Kilkenny. You’d imagine the likes of Bugler, Basquel, Gannon, Eoin Murchan, Seán MacMahon and Paddy Small are probably on the safer end of the axeman’s blade too. After that though? It’s hard to know.
You’d have presumed someone like Brian Howard was above reproach but Brennan hauled him off against Mayo after half an hour. When he spoke afterwards about “some of our fellas who’ve been around the block”, does he mean the likes of Niall Scully or Davy Byrne or Cormac Costello? Is he really going to pull the curtain down on long careers like theirs during a two-week break in the league? And if he does, then who is really safe?
Brian Howard during Dublin’s Division 1 match against Donegal at Croke Park last month. The multiple All-Ireland winner was hauled ashore by manager Ger Brennan after half an hour of Dublin’s next match against Mayo. Photograph: Tom Maher/Inpho
“That’s what Ger is like,” says Paddy Andrews. “He’s affable and sound and absolutely ruthless. I’d say he’s happy that after what he said in Castlebar, every single player in the group is looking over his shoulder and wondering, ‘Is he talking about me?’. That’s long overdue.
“The thing with Ger is that even though he’s steeped in Dublin football, he’s almost an outsider in a way. Jim [Gavin] and Dessie both came through the underage system and were working with lads they’d known since they were teenagers. But Ger came through a different way and other than maybe a few of them who went to UCD, none of them have any currency with him. Nobody has anything in the bank. So they all have to prove themselves from scratch.”
Clearing out the cupboards brings its own issues, of course, chief among them the fact that the restocking options aren’t all that obvious. The assumption that the Dublin machine is built to spit out bespoke intercounty players by the dozen has been routinely undercut since the start of the decade, as they’ve tumbled down the underage pecking order.
Their last under-21 All-Ireland was in 2017. Their last Leinster under-20 title was in 2020. Louth, Meath and Kildare are all buoyant at that age-grade, whereas Dublin haven’t so much as made a provincial final since 2023. At minor level, they won back-to-back Leinster titles in 2022 and 2023 but they haven’t been to an All-Ireland final since winning in 2012.
“There’s no secret sauce to this,” says Andrews. “Look around every All-Ireland winning county and there’s usually a top-class minor or under-20 team somewhere back the years that has fed into it. That’s definitely the case in Dublin. We have always needed that.
“The 2003 under-21 team had Alan Brogan and Bryan Cullen and that fed into Pat Gilroy’s team. The 2009 and 2010 teams had Jonny Cooper and Dean Rock and Cian O’Sullivan, and they fed into Jim’s initial team. The 2012 and 2014 teams were a freak – Jack McCaffrey, Ciarán Kilkenny, Paul Mannion, Brian Fenton and all the rest of them. Ger doesn’t have anything like that coming through.”
Somewhere along the way, the production line got gummed up. It wasn’t just that the underage teams weren’t successful, it was that they stopped unearthing diamonds. As the great Dublin team aged out, their replacements rarely caught the eye. The days of young Dublin players exploding onto the scene ready to be match-winners has gone.
On this, the numbers are indisputable. If we take the past five seasons of the senior team in isolation, the age profile of the best Dublin players is startlingly high. Dublin players have won seven All Stars since 2021 – their average age has been 32.14. The youngest Dublin player to win an All Star in that time was Basquel, who was 27 when he won his in 2023. The Dubs have had 27 All Star nominations in the past five years – only four of them went to players who were under 25.
Colm Basquel scores a goal for Dublin in the 2023 Leinster Senior Football Championship final victory against Louth at Croke Park. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho
Between 2011 and 2018, Dublin players James McCarthy, Jack McCaffrey, Paul Mannion, Con O’Callaghan and Brian Howard were all shortlisted for Young Footballer of the Year. The first three are retired, O’Callaghan turns 30 in April and Howard will be 29 this year. In the past seven seasons, Dublin have had just one player shortlisted for the award – Lee Gannon in 2022.
“Dublin took their eye off the ball with the underage structures in the good times,” says Flynn. “They didn’t replenish the pot. I think they’ve recognised that and they’ve gone back to the start with it again. I think bringing in Jonny Cooper and Michael Darragh Macauley to take charge of the 20s is a good move. I’m glad to see they have Mick Bohan in working with the development squads. They’re taking action there.
“The trial games over the winter were a good exercise. Every club was asked to send players forward that they thought would be of a good enough standard. I took one of the teams along with Michael Darragh and Alan Brogan. There were four squads of 30 players or so and from that he’s unearthed a few players, like Jack Lundy and so on.
“But they’ll take time. They’re not ready to go. People always forget that in the main, there’s a massive gap between club and county. There are some examples of people who can just do it but the majority of people take time to adapt. If you’re asking me, ‘If Ger is to cut four All-Ireland winners from the squad, is there another four to replace them?’, my answer would be, ‘Not yet, no’.”
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And yet, the harder you look at the Dublin squad, the more sense it makes for a bloodletting to happen now rather than at some point down the road. Having 17 All-Ireland medallists to call on sounds enticing but they’ve all been there for the past two years and the Dubs have gone backwards.
“Being Dublin manager sounds like an unbelievably attractive job,” says Andrews. “You have all these options, hundreds of players to choose from, all the backing any county manager could want, etc, etc . . . But at the same time, Ger is coming into a gig where the expectation levels from the man in the street are still sky high and the appreciation of the lack of depth is very low.
“The Dubs are still hanging their hat on the players who have been there for years. And on the face of it, if you can put out a team with Con, Kilkenny, Murchan, Howard, Gannon, Bugler, Scully, Paddy Small, Cormac Costello all on it, then that’s not a bad team at all. But the chances of them all being fully fit every day you go out are slim at best.
“So if you bank on them and then three of them are injured for the All-Ireland quarter-final, you run the risk of just losing another season and not moving forward. Ger has to think about the next five years, not just 2026.
“Can Dublin win an All-Ireland in the next few years? Of course. Could I see it this year? Absolutely not.”