Pat Gilroy recalled how a clear-the-air meeting in Corduff, Co. Monaghan just three months after Dublin's 2009 All-Ireland quarter-final hammering by Kerry was the catalyst for yesterday's All-Ireland success.

"We addressed the Kerry game in November 2009 in a very strong way," the Dublin manager revealed.

"We dealt with it and it stayed there. I'm glad now we can really put it behind us but we did deal with it in Corduff in 2009. There was a development squad game where a lot of the guys came up as well. We played Monaghan under the lights in the rain. A lot of it was dealt with there and then. And that was the best place for it."

Gilroy said it had got to the stage before yesterday's win where Dublin couldn't take any more knocks.

"There's only so much pain humans can take and we've been through ... I mean I've only been here a short time in comparison to some of these fellas but, as a supporter, we've been through terrible days here and there's only so much of that you can keep taking.

"Today, no matter what happened out there, we were going to get the result, to be honest. That's the attitude we had all week. We weren't just happy getting to a final. We wanted to push on and win it.

"We felt that maybe running at Kerry in the last 20 minutes might yield some dividends and we had some guys on the bench that could do that. Kevin was obviously one of those. Even when there was only three minutes left I felt that we would create the goal chances with the guys we had on the pitch. We always felt, irrespective of the score, that we were going to finish this game out and we would see if we came out the wrong side of it." Tweet

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