DUBLIN HAVE BECOME THE first intercounty squad to head off for a warm weather training camp in the middle of a championship season.
Dessie Farrell’s side departed from Dublin airport on Tuesday morning for Portugal, where they will spend the next few days and nights plotting their way to an All-Ireland defence.
It says much about their order of priorities when they can leave behind a Leinster campaign and clearly signal that their preparations are going up a notch after they got through a surprisingly durable challenge from Louth in Sunday’s provincial final.
They now go into the round robin phase of the All Ireland championship, joining Mayo, Roscommon and Cavan.
Dublin headed away last year and in the past, while under Jim Gavin, have travelled to The Somme for a short trip in 2018, though players on that trip have insisted that no training took place.
The notion of Portugal for a training camp first emerged with Kerry under Páidí ÓSé in the late ‘90s. It became the ‘in’ thing to do when Armagh embarked on one in 2002 ahead of winning their first All-Ireland, and has exploded in popularity.
Kerry this year headed to the Quinta do Lago in the Algarve, for a tune up after the last round of the league.
For the first time ever, Derry went to Portugal for a camp.
The same country has been a regular staging post for Limerick on their way to four consecutive All-Ireland hurling titles.
Cork footballers went in the middle of March for four days.
The GAA had previously intended to clamp down on foreign training trips in 2019 after Armagh footballers and Waterford hurlers lost home advantage for league games as a punishment for going on camps outside of the permitted timeframe of 10 days prior to a championship game.
The advent of Covid and the introduction of the split season was the cure for a problem that clearly wasn’t going to be solved.
Any sense of uneasiness that Croke Park might have felt around such trips has had to be shelved when it was worked out that taking a panel, management and backroom abroad to a training camp was working out cheaper than trying to arrange something similar within Ireland.
Recently-crowned Ulster champions Donegal took the rather unusual step ahead of the season when they went to Tenerife in the first week of December for a pre-Christmas training camp in order to prepare themselves for the season ahead.
