Shane Stapleton spoke with Dublin manager Mattie Kenny after their 2-31 to 0-23 win over Laois.
Mattie Kenny admits that he didn’t know where Dublin were at before their 14-point win over Laois on Saturday evening.
Dublin tried to organise challenge matches ahead of their Leinster quarter-final clash, but they fell through for one reason or another.
All of which meant that the Galway native had not seen his team in competitive action for many months, nor championships since last summer.
“You have to put it in context and the context is it’s the first competitive game we’ve played since February so there’s always going to be a few little things that we’ll be a bit rusty at,” says Kenny.
“The challenge for a lot of the teams is on your first day out, not knowing fully what to expect.
“We had a couple of challenge games organised that fell through because when Dublin went into Level 3, the games we were going to play didn’t go ahead.
“So we hadn’t got a challenge game with any other county in the run-up to this.
“We were relying on competitive in-house games so we were always a little bit apprehensive with what we were benchmarking it against to say whether you were going well or not.
“To get that 70-plus minutes under the belt tonight, we’re delighted.”
Donal Burke was on fire throughout and hit 1-16, and manager Kenny was delighted to have the Na Fianna man back in his panel for 2020.
“Donal has been a great player since he was 16, 17. Played really well for Dublin minors and U21s.
“He was always a great talent coming through and we in Dublin were delighted this evening to see him doing it out there at senior level.
“He’s a very, very skilfull player, a great striker of the ball and in fairness to the young lad he got some lovely scores there tonight. “
