Cian O’Sullivan takes positives from league ahead of championship

Dublin footballer Cian O'Sullivan hopes that the Dubs NFL final defeat to Kerry will come will longer term benefits.

The Dubs begin the defence of the Leinster SFC against Carlow or Wexford on June 3 and the Kilmacud Crokes clubman feels that the talk of the unbeaten run Jim Gavin's run were on prior to the league decider was something of a distraction.

“You are probably well aware that players try and steer clear of all those things as best we can and we wouldn’t have been paying too much heed to the unbeaten run and however many games it is," says Cian.

“But it was just so widely talked about and publicised, that your friends and family, or in the media or where-ever, that it is very hard to get away from it.

“It does seep into the subconscious and therefore become a bit of distraction to your preparations for the game. That is done away with now. That distraction isn’t there.

“So, is it a positive going into the summer? Yeah, it probably is. It’s a good thing that that distraction is kind of gone now."

Despite the loss to Kerry Cian says the Dubs showed their trademark mettle to come back into contention in a game that looked to have totally gone away from them.

“We would have had a few kind of defining games over the last number of years. The mental resolve and resilience that’s built into the team, that’s probably one of our greatest strengths.

“And we’ve shown it time and time again. But to get that, to build that, you have to come through those type of games. You need those defining wins.

“There’s no amount of sitting around a training ground in front of a flip chart that you can do to learn that. You have to experience it.

“You have to be in a game with ten minutes to go behind four or five points and pull it out of the bag to really build that kind of resilience in the team.

“And I think that has been a hallmark of our success over the last four or five years.

“Obviously Kerry will take a lot out of that win against us in the League Final, but I think we still showed...I think they probably could have won by a bit more than they actually did if we didn’t turn things around the last five, ten minutes.

“So thankfully, again we showed that we still have that string to our bow - we are happy with how we closed out the games.

“It’s just unfortunately that the rest of it wasn’t up to our standards,” adds Cian.

Sports compression wear leader, SKINS, have announced the renewal of their sponsorship agreement with Dublin GAA until 2018. The sponsorship will see SKINS provide compression and recovery garments for the Dublin senior football and hurling team.