By Paul Keane

A month ago, Dublin left Celtic Park ruing the goal they never got against Derry in Round 5 of their Allianz NFL Division 2 campaign.

They lost that game by a point and Ciaran Kilkenny's decision to fist over a score late on, when a goal may have materialised if he'd handpassed across to Cormac Costello, was widely debated afterwards.

Four weeks on, and meeting again in the Division 2 decider at Croke Park, Dublin were more ruthless this time and struck the net no less than four times to gain a little bit of revenge and to secure the silverware.

Truth be told, they could have had several more goals given the amount of chances they created overall.

"We've been working on some stuff on the practice ground, just a little bit more focus on goal scoring and execution of goal scoring," said Dublin manager Dessie Farrell.

"We probably coughed up a few chances throughout the league, not necessarily through poor shot execution, more through the awareness, not seeing players available in a position to score an easier goal than some of the opportunities that we tried. That's all really, a sharper focus on it."

Killian O'Gara, Paul Mannion, John Small and Lorcan O'Dell struck those four Dublin goals though Small, Tom Lahiff, Sean Bugler and Daire Newcombe had opportunities for other three pointers too.

Farrell agreed that it was a 'mixed bag' of a performance overall.

"Yeah, definitely," he said. "Some aspects would be pleasing. Defensively we were pretty solid at times. Just the shooting efficiency up front wasn't great. We probably missed more than half the shots we took which definitely won't be good enough as we progress through the summer. It's good to have something to focus on and to really go after."

Dublin will return to action on April 23 to begin the defence of their Leinster title. They will play Wexford or Laois.

"The next couple of weeks are going to be really important to us," said Farrell. "We had a very flat league campaign last year, a mixed bag this year. It's hard to know where we're really at so this couple of weeks is going to be important. Bringing variety, bringing discipline, bringing rigour to our game in various different areas is going to be really important as we head into the Championship."

Derry manager Rory Gallagher said the rare league defeat for his team won't define their season.

"It's not the trophy, it's the competition and we tried to have a go at eachother," said Gallagher. "I'd be happy with a lot of the first-half. I think we should have stretched it (the lead) out. Up until they got the third goal, I thought we played really well, there was nothing between the teams. But we've got to take our chances."

Gallagher praised Dublin's Con O'Callaghan in particular for some 'absolutely brilliant' movement in attack.

"We wanted to see where we're at," continued Gallagher. "We haven't found out an awful lot about ourselves playing the vast majority of teams in Division 2, so it was great to play Dublin and to see them bringing on the number of players they did and getting a feel for them.

"We found out that we're still not putting up enough scores when we should. A lot of the games we've played over the last couple of years, we've run away with them. Our lack of clinical edge hasn't been found out. We didn't punish them in the first-half with a number of easy scoring chances. Any mistake you make against any top-level team, you're going to struggle."