David Clifford named to start for Kerry as bumper crowds return to Croke Park

It’s been too long. Just short of three years since the last time Croke Park welcomed the sort of GAA crowds it will see this weekend. A shade over 1,000 days since the match day traffic got properly snarled on the roads and side streets around Drumcondra. Ed Sheeran is the only performer to have filled the place in the meantime. Nice lad, grand set of pipes on him. Bit wet for what’s going to be needed this weekend, all the same.

Four quarter-finals, eight counties, upwards of 130,000 expected on Dublin 3 across the weekend. It’s only 18 months since some of us were among the chosen few who were allowed to attend the plague winter All-Ireland finals, rattling around an empty stadium, parking our cars 50 yards from the Jones’s Road entrance. This weekend, we won’t be able to get the motor within a mile of the place. Hallelujah.

Quarter-final weekend pulls the strands from every corner of the land and ties them up at headquarters. For the first time ever, the Ulster contingent in the last eight doesn’t include either Tyrone or Donegal. For only the second time, three Munster teams make the quarters. Galway and Mayo come from Connacht with the power dynamics reversed, the latter more wary of the former’s potential All-Ireland run for the first time in over a decade. Dublin are Dublin, the only Leinster team standing, as usual.

No end of storylines, of course. Some new, some ragged with the retelling at this stage. The biggest beasts meet on Sunday, with Kerry taking on Mayo and Armagh playing Galway. Mayo arrive at the business end like they always do – a bit dishevelled, fraying around the edges, daring everyone to believe that this time they’re done. Their record at this stage of the competition is all the warning anyone needs to take no notice.

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Mayo haven’t lost an All-Ireland quarter-final since 2009. Since then, they’ve played eight – including a de facto one against Donegal in the last game of the Super-8s in 2019 – and won them all. They were supposed to be done ahead of that game, even though it was in Castlebar. Just as they were apparently finished against Tyrone in 2016 and hadn’t a prayer against defending All-Ireland champions Cork in 2011. Kerry are heavy favourites this time. Let’s see what that’s worth to them.

James Horan has made one change from the win over Kildare, with Jordan Flynn coming for Jason Doherty. More to the point, the named 15 shows six changes from the league final when Kerry tanned their hides for them – Robbie Hennelly, Oisín Mullin, Eoghan McLoughlin, Paddy Durcan, Diarmuid O’Connor and Cillian O’Connor. On any roll-call of the Mayo battalion, that’s a fair chunk of the officer class back in boots. We’ll have to wait until Sunday to see if Ryan O’Donoghue has made the bench.

For Kerry, the injury doubts around David Clifford have eased and he takes his place at full-forward. David Moran starts in midfield, with neither Jack Barry nor Adrian Spillane named in the 26. That’s a significant tightening of Kerry’s midfield resources, although Stefan Okunbor has been named among the replacements. All in all, it’s a formidable Kerry selection and it should be enough to do the job. We’ve been wrong before though.

So what else? Galway and Armagh open the bill on Sunday with what looks a candidate to be not just the closest game of the weekend but the easiest on the eye too. Outside of the Dubs, Armagh will likely bring the biggest crowd of the weekend. They’ll definitely bring the loudest. Hard to believe it’s 17 years since those bright orange jerseys filled the place for an All-Ireland semi-final, back when they were the hardiest, nuttiest bucks around.

This time, they’re all fast-breaks and long kicks and languid, silken point-taking. If any team is going to play party-pooper in this one, it’ll be Galway. Pádraic Joyce has latterly discovered some of the defensive zeal that his predecessor Kevin Walsh took all the heat for. Does he park the bus here to keep Armagh under wraps? Or does he set his pretties free and tell them to fly, fly and see what happens? Mouth-watering either way.

Derry haven’t played a championship game in Croke Park since losing to Kildare in the fourth round of the qualifiers in 2011. They haven’t won there since beating Westmeath in the 2004 All-Ireland quarter-final. The fable of Derry’s support consisting of a small but committed band of boosters from around the Loughshore will be given the lie in the middle of Saturday afternoon. The county is emptying out for the journey south.

In Clare, they don’t want the summer to end. In Cork, they only hope the end isn’t too ugly. In Dublin, they trundle on, not quite sure yet of who they are but suspecting it will see them through the weekend handy enough.

Two days to tell all the stories. Settle in.