Ger Brennan’s side pulled off a surprise 1-25 to 1-21 against Galway on Sunday<\/a> to set up a showdown meeting with last year’s champions Kerry on 12 July.<\/p>\nSpeaking on RT\u00c9’s Morning Ireland, Fitzmaurice said that earlier in the season the Kingdom would have been seen as out-and-out favourites to progress, but insists the Dubs have shown a steep upward curve with victories over Donegal and Galway.<\/p>\n
“I think that’s what we would have been saying a month ago (Kerry being strong favourites against Dublin) but, to be fair to them, they’ve had some fantastic wins over the last couple of weeks,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Particularly against a Galway team I would have really fancied and previously against Donegal who the whole country fancied to go on and win an All Ireland, so I think they deserve massive credit.<\/p>\n
“Ger Brennan, he is blending the old crew – the likes of Con [O’Callaghan], Ciar\u00e1n Kilkenny, [Niall] Scully, Davy Byrne, Cormac Costello – with some debutants this year – Eoin Kennedy, Sean Guiden, Charlie McMorrow.<\/p>\n
“So he is getting the mix right.”<\/p>\n
One area that Fitzmaurice picked out in particular for Dublin to focus on was their shooting. Their challenge this year was looking tenuous after they lost to both Westmeath and Louth in May.<\/p>\n
However with Brennan back on the sideline following his 12-week suspension, his team have taken down Donegal and Galway, finishing both games strongly to continue their journey in the championship.<\/p>\n
“I think they will be doing a lot of shooting practice between here and the semi-final because it’s possibly the only thing that’s leaving them down because if they bring their shooting boots to Croke Park they’ll be hard to stop,” Fitzmaurice said.<\/p>\n
Louth take on Mayo in the other semi-final and Fitzmaurice lauded the performance that the Leinster side put in to reach the last four of the championship for the first time in 69 years.<\/p>\n
“Louth, to be fair, I think they were the story of the weekend playing almost the entire game with 14 men,” he said.<\/p>\n
“After Kerry lost to Donegal in Killarney it was basically explained away that they played the whole second half with 14 men that you couldn’t do it with the new rules but Louth showed us all – and in Croke Park of all places – how you can do it.<\/p>\n
“They had incredible individual displays from the like of Dara McDonnell, who got man of the match. Their fitness levels, their ability, their accuracy in the second half, they really were incredible.<\/p>\n
“They’re going to fancy their chances as are Mayo. That’s a real 50-50 game and it’s going to make for another fantastic weekend of football.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former Kerry manager \u00c9amonn Fitzmaurice have said that Dublin will be hard to stop if they bring their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":524125,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-524124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=524124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524124\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/524125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=524124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=524124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=524124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}