Paul Flynn's weekend football predications

Through my experience, I've learned the hard way that semi-finals throw up surprises. We learnt that in 2014 playing Donegal when we were favourites going in and we sucker-punched.

It’s not wise for the players to be think there’s an air of inevitability about these games and I don’t think they will.

When you look at Dublin and Monaghan, we’ve never had an easy run of it playing against Monaghan through my career and even in the last time these teams met in 2022, Monaghan came out on top.

I think there’s a case of recency bias in relation to the performance we’ve seen from Dublin against Mayo, especially in that second half where they were just phenomenal in relation to their work-rate, their intensity and how they pressed up on Mayo’s kick-outs.

If Monaghan try to play the ball short through kick-outs and then play a slow, deliberate attacking style, like they have since the Derry game this year, they could be in trouble.

Dublin have learned so much from that Roscommon experience, where they let Roscommon have the ball in their own half and didn’t press them. I think Dublin will press up all over the pitch and try to pin Monaghan in.

That will make it really interesting to see if Monaghan can flip their tactics and kick the ball over the intense press and get the ball into their forward line.

Any time Monaghan are written off, we know what happens. They have some character in this team and we’ve seen, even in the league this year that you can’t write anyone off.

But I just feel that, based on the performance we’ve seen from Dublin, they are peaking at the right time and have strength and depth in their squad. The aura about Dublin seems to be back a little bit and I think they’ll find a way to win this by three of four points.

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