Five-time Dublin All Star John O’Leary believes that Diarmuid Connolly needs to become a more disciplined player before he can be considered a true great of the game.
Connolly was sent from the pitch five minutes from half-time when he received a black-card in Dublin’s 0-20 to 1-16 league final defeat on Sunday.
Connolly was shown the black card for the second time in two games after he hauled Gavin Crowley off the ball five minutes before half-time.
The St Vincent’s clubman has a history of ill-discipline and speaking on the RTÉ GAA Podcast, O’Leary insisted that Connolly needs to be less petulant as a player.
"I’m not going to preach to him but he needs to become a great player by ensuring he doesn’t fall into those traps that opposition set for you," he said.
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"A pull of a jersey, little niggle and a bit of a push and a shove. The really, really good players don’t react to that. They react by becoming even better footballers and putting the ball over the bar and in the back of the net.
"Then, the fella that’s been aggravating you feels even worse but he’s risen to that niggle a couple of times, to his own personal cost and a couple of times to the team’s cost.
"So he’s got to grow more mature when it happens, and learn from it. He’s still a young man but he’s a lot of experience on the pitch and you’d like to think he’d have it out of his system by now. He has to lose that trait to become a really great player."
O’Leary believes that Connolly is now a target for other teams not only because of his skill with the ball, but because he’s seen as someone with a suspect temperament.
"You put your heart on your sleeve and you put yourself out there for that exposure.
"Plenty of really good footballers have had to live with that, whether it was the ‘Gooch’ (Colm Cooper), Peter Canavan, Mikey Sheehy. Lots of players over lots of decades will be the target because they’re that good. It’s a statement in itself, that they feel he’s such a danger.
"He's just got to live with it and put up with it. He’s done it really well many a time but a couple of times, the screen falls back and the shade drops and he reacts and he gets caught.
"But he’s a phenomenal footballer, no doubt."
