A. WHENweighing up who'll win an All Ireland, there's a certain criteria most of us instinctively use. A team's sense of mission, or as we say in Gah-land, their "hunger".

The intuition and credibility of their coach.

And forwards. To win an All Ireland you must have at least two exceptional forwards, and to win a provincial crown, at least one. Go back every year after Maurice in '97 and it's held true. Galway had Fallon and Donnellan, then Joyce and Savage; Kerry, Mike Frank and Crowley, then Gooch, O Cinneide and Donaghy; Meath had Giles directing the Ollie and Geraghty show;

Armagh, Oisin, Stevie and Clarke, and Tyrone, Canavan, Mulligan (right) and O'Neill.

This year, there's been some kind of epidemic. So many top forwards are either on the treatment table or ready for the shrink's couch, their form, fitness or focus having deserted them.

This time two years ago, Stephen O'Neill was already in Player of the Year mode but he's never been the same since his hamstrings started acting up last year and now they're at him again. Doubts surround the timing of Brian McGuigan's return and, even when he does, you have to wonder if he'll ever be the same player. Even after beating the suspension rap, Owen Mulligan is doubtful for the Fermanagh game. And when he regains his fitness, his form is another matter; his two red cards this spring were symptomatic of a player at war with his own game.

Elsewhere in Ulster, Benny Coulter is coming off his worst ever league campaign. Stevie McDonnell continues to advance his claim as the best forward of the decade but won't have his partner Ronan Clarke back until Armagh hit Croke Park . . . if they hit Croke Park.

A few weeks ago, Paddy Bradley and Derry seemed on course for their first Ulster final since his debut year in 2000. He was the one forward in Division One to average more than McDonnell from play and in total, but then he got into that row with that ref. He'll be back in time for the Ulster final but, without him, will Derry get that far?

Brendan Devenney also looks like he could be out for three months. Even if he's back before then, that stomach tear will severely restrict him and, for all their depth, Donegal without a fully-fit Devenney will be severely restricted themselves.

Out west then, you have Ciaran McDonald with, as John O'Mahony put it 10 days ago, "the most famous injury in Ireland". He's back doing some light work with the group, but he's done that before this year too only to break down. If he doesn't return, whose that other blue-chip forward to complement Conor Mortimer?

Trevor Mortimer? Two years ago maybe, but fitness and form have denied him stringing two good consecutive games together since.

Michael Meehan, understandably given his family's recent bereavement, is coming off the most subdued spring of his career and still seems way off the championship player he's only sporadically threatened to be.

His underage sidekick meanwhile, Sean Armstrong, through injury and form, hasn't played a decent game at this level since a promising spell in the middle of last year's league. Padraic Joyce continues to swing over the frees but, even though he was one of only five Division One players to score from play in every game he played this year, he'll need to exit that comfort zone and notch at least another point or two a game for Galway to exit theirs.

Last year Dublin had the forwards to win an All Ireland but they'll find it hard to recapture that groove.

We trust Alan Brogan's disrupted league won't duly affect him, but Conal Keaney's game appears to have plateaued, even dipped, while Ray Cosgrove has barely kicked a ball at this level since having been bizarrely taken off in last year's All Ireland semi-final.

Even Kerry, with their galaxy of forwards, have question marks hovering over them. Will that shoulder of Kieran Donaghy's withstand a summer of bumping and thumping? Will he be able to handle the tactics and taunts that will be thrown at him? (The rate of yellow cards he mounted up in the league hardly dispelled such doubts). Couldn't Gooch and Eoin Brosnan have done with the kind of break Paul Galvin and Declan O'Sullivan had? Will Galvin somehow get away with another year without suspension?

Will he somehow change his ways? Will Mike Frank be able to keep Declan Quill off the starting 15? Is Quill finally ready to prove himself as a championship player?

So many forwards with so many questions. Wish we could answer them but we're football analysts, not faith healers or soothsayers. The summer will answer them though.

Q. Can Dublin recapture 2005's form and win the close games?

A. INDave Berry's The Dubs documentary, there's a scene where the players are gathered around Paul Caffrey (left) in the bowels of Croke Park. His back is to the wall and in a way, so are theirs; they're trailing Meath at half time in their first real test of the summer. "Have we been in games like this before?" he asks.

"Yes!" yell the group.

"Have we come through games like this before?"

And again they reply in the affirmative, first, right there; later, out on the field.

Back then in 2005 it was a question Caffrey could pose and his players could answer. In Caffrey's first league game, Mossy Quinn iced a last-minute 45 to beat Mayo, similar to the pressure frees he'd nail that summer against Laois and Tyrone. They pipped Donegal by a point and Westmeath by two in that league too, a sign of the nerve they'd repeatedly display later that year to capture only their second Leinster title in 10 years. Back then Dublin had a record and love of winning the tight games. Back then.

Caffrey can no longer call on the weapon that was that question. After the infamous brawl in Omagh, they featured in three other nailbiters in last year's league . . . Fermanagh, Cork, Kerry . . . and failed to win any of them.

And when the heat and Mayo's footsteps closed in on them last August, they hadn't the confidence or knowhow to make the clutch plays.

This year's been even worse. True, they shaded a tight game with Limerick but who in Division 1A didn't? They had considerable half-time leads against Tyrone and Donegal but were again overrun in the second half, bringing their record in one-point games in league and championship this past two seasons to one win and five defeats. It's a dismal ratio, especially compared to Mayo, who for all the (unfair) accusations of being chokers, are 7-0 in one-point games over the same time span.

Even when they drew level with Kerry last month, the Dubs were outscored by two points in the closing five minutes. It was depressing, if predictable. For the last six years Dublin have been knocked out of the championship by the same four teams who keep contesting All Ireland finals . . . Kerry, Armagh, Tyrone and Mayo.

Every time Dublin put it up to those teams, yet every time lost. This spring they needed to beat those top teams . . . yet every time lost.

So, they're doomed, agreed? Because to win an All Ireland they'll have to go through those teams, and they can hardly give them the cold-eye stare of champions, right?

Well, actually, Dublin might just be okay. This Close Games Blues is not a terminal condition. Pillar has the biggest back-room team in football and between them they're bound to have identified a few trends.

Whatever about starting games, Mossy Quinn must finish them. Go through all the tight games they've either won or drawn since he broke onto the scene; the only time they've gotten away without him was when the audacious but hardly dependable Mark Vaughan converted some monstrous frees against Meath. Quinn wasn't on the field for the last 10 minutes of last year's All Ireland semi-final, nor for that late free under the lights against Tyrone, while he'd have been the one, not Diarmuid Connolly, taking the penalty his clubmate missed in Castlebar last month if Caffrey hadn't withdrawn him. Quinn could do more from play but for years Dublin lost games because they didn't have a freetaker. Now they have one, who relishes, not shirks, pressure. Use him.

Two, most of Dublin's defeats in the tight, big games can be sourced at midfield. If Ciaran Whelan can get even more support and can keep his cool when he's not at his brilliant best, they can win it all. And not every game against a big team has to be a close one. Pillar's crew must look to kill teams off, not switch off.

Also, champions are selective thinkers. Jack Nicklaus once claimed he never missed a three-foot putt in a major. He was wrong but he was right to be wrong. The Dubs have to remember those tightrope games of '05, that they've beaten Tyrone three times in the last five years, that they've beaten Mayo too.

There's something else in Dublin's favour. They'll be tested in Leinster this year. Meath or Kildare will put it up to them on 3 June, Offaly too, and whoever they'll meet . . . okay, Laois . . . in the final. It could just be like 2005, when they won Leinster the hard way . . . and this time, there'll hardly be a side as explosive as Tyrone waiting for them in the last eight. Dublin will need to win close games to win an All Ireland alright.

But it's a habit they can pick up in Leinster.

Q. Is Darragh O Se the greatest footballer of his generation?

SHORTLY after he inherited a team with a shot of creating history by winning backto-back All Irelands, Pat O'Shea told some of his senior players an insight from his beloved basketball and its human beacon, Michael Jordan.

For Jordan, it wasn't just about winning championships. It was about every day showing someone somewhere he was the best. Even if the Bulls were on the road playing some low-ranked team during the regular season which they'd beat in their sleep, the way Jordan looked at it was that somewhere in that crowd was a kid or old hoops fan who had scrambled hard for that ticket and would never see Jordan in the flesh again.

He wanted that one person to walk away and be able to say for a lifetime that they had seen the legend themselves, and that he was even better than they say he was.

By the way he's played in this year's league, that story has really resonated with Darragh O Se (right).

Kevin Cassidy and Neil Gallagher might have played some stunning football this past few months but this year's league has only underlined that O Se is still the midfield daddy of them all.

Only Anthony Tohill in the last 15 years has been . . .

arguably . . . a better league midfielder, but as complete as Tohill's game was, his career wasn't. For a number of reasons . . . limited support cast, the negativity of Ulster . . . he didn't get to play and dominate in Croke Park often enough in the summer. O Se has, routinely. There have been some other colossal midfielders in the modern era . . . McDermott, Walsh, Whelan, McGrane, and already, Cavanagh . . . but none of them have either had the all-round game or staying power as O Se. Simply put, he's the best midfielder the game has seen since Jack O'Shea.

Actually, we'll go one further. It's about time when we look at the players of our generation we stop limiting it to forwards like Canavan and Fitzgerald; about time in Kerry that they appreciated him as much as . . . possibly even more than . . . Moynihan and Maurice. Darragh O Se might just be the greatest player of his generation.

A fifth All Ireland medal, something no other player has done since O'Dwyer's immortals, would seal his greatness, and by winning back-to-back, seal that of the side he's led this past 10 years.

Some incidents have blotted his name in some parts, like how he's occasionally resorted to the odd stray elbow or knee against his Munster adversaries, John Galvin and Nicholas Murphy. Though the Cork camp have often overdone the accusations of Kerry being cynical, at times their fears have been justified. Before last year's All Ireland semi-final, Billy Morgan was so convinced O Se would target Murphy that he consulted his hurling counterpart, John Allen, to devise a strategy.

According to the story, which says everything about the contrasting temperaments of the two coaches, Allen told Morgan that the Cork hurlers, in a similar predicament, would adopt their 'Silent Pig' policy of playing above the manhandling and ignoring it. "Mmm, " Morgan apparently muttered, "we were thinking of one in, all in." And in Cork they'd say he'd have been right, too.

O Se has outplayed Cork so often though . . . his displays against the old enemy in 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002 would all make the top 10 aerial exhibitions by a midfielder in the last decade . . . that even they have to accept his greatness. It's the same up north. After Armagh won the 2002 All Ireland, it became the consensus among the Ulster football fraternity that Paul McGrane had won his individual display with O Se, while minutes after Tyrone's win in 2005 some of their players were confiding in the dressing room that "that Darragh O Se isn't all he's cracked up to be". Yet, in each final, O Se was on the ball more often than any other player. McGrane merely held his own with O Se, while it was O Se who responded to Canavan's goal with a great point before half-time to keep Kerry in that game.

Other great players know how great he is. In Peter Canavan's book on Tyrone's 2003 adventure, Canavan wrote that while Tyrone beat Kerry in a league game in Killarney that year, O Se put on such an exhibition that Sean Cavanagh "learned more from that game than any other".

O Se makes opponents better. He makes teammates better. And he makes himself better. That catch and point off his left foot from 50 yards against Longford last year; those two booming points with his right against Donegal in March; those were things he couldn't or didn't do five years ago.

This might be his last year, so get to see him if you never have. It'll be something to boast to the grandkids for years.