Dubs star Scully demands a stop to doom & gloom & vows Blues will turn up the heat

A DEFIANT Niall Scully insists that Dublin can still contend strongly for an All-Ireland despite their first Leinster loss in 15 years.

- BY PAT NOLAN,

Scully has already pored over the video of the Meath game - twice - and admits that there can be no complaint at the outcome.

There was a time when Dublin's big provincial ties, win or lose, were a catalyst for a social spillover into Monday and perhaps beyond, but those days are long gone and Scully was in front of the laptop first thing the next morning as he sought answers in the wake of the four-point loss in Portlaoise.

"I woke up and I was, obviously, disappointed," he said.

"I watched the game back on Monday morning and I don't think, as a team and a collective, you can have any complaints from the performances of both sides.

"Meath are a good side. We won the Sam Maguire from Division Two and they probably should have been promoted, just missed out promotion to Division One this year.

"They came with a game plan and executed it. Down the last 10 minutes, we'd a lot of unforced turnovers and our execution was off."

And it took two viewings for him to get the bottom of it. "Now, in all fairness, I'd be more so looking at my own individual performance before I would be looking elsewhere," Scully explained, when speaking at Super Valu's All-Ireland Championship launch in Cork.