It wasn’t a vintage All-Ireland, but Dublin and Kerry can deliver a grandstand finish

You have measured out your life in Dublin-Kerry All-Irelands. If you’re 80 now, you were a teenager for the 1955 final, the one so many people went to that it caused British Rail to schedule extra trains to Holyhead. For anyone hitting 60, it felt like every September of your youth was about Mikey and Bomber, Mullins and Barney. Nobody under 40 has a memory of Dublin ever losing a final to Kerry. If you’re 20, you hopefully have better things to be thinking about.

Mercifully, the soup of nostalgia has thinned to a broth over the years. The best thing about the Dublin-Kerry final of 2023 is that it is its own thing. It has its own context, its own generational heroes, its own neuroses and paranoias. It beckons you towards it because of the here and now, not the way back when.

And it’s the All-Ireland final, let’s not forget. A vaunted thing, despite it all. No sport is more moaned about than Gaelic football. Forget sport — no single thing in Ireland that is loved by such an enormous slice of the population is more readily derided or more often declared a dead duck. People love it so much, they hate it.

They hate all the hand-passing. All the possession stuff. The blanket defences. The forward mark. The black card. The fly goalies. The parking. The cashless turnstiles. The tickets on the phone. The Brown And White In One Bite for the sandwiches. The refs who are obsessed with a jersey-pull 60 yards away but can’t spot a lad taking 13 steps in front of his nose. They hate it all.

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And they can’t get enough of it. They hate it so much that for the past four years in a row, the football final has been the most-watched sporting event on Irish television. In all but one of those years, it was beaten only by the Late Late Toy Show (it was fifth in 2020 – pushed down by a lot of newsy, Covidy stuff). In 2019, the last time Kerry and Dublin met in the final, the drawn match and replay grabbed the second and third biggest TV audiences of the year.

The figures for 2023 will possibly be overtaken by the Rugby World Cup — Ireland v South Africa is on at 8pm on a Saturday night, ditto Ireland v Scotland. Any knock-out game (games?) will be in prime time too. But a Dublin-Kerry All-Ireland final will hold its own.

There’s a truth in there somewhere. It tells us that despite everything, Gaelic football still reaches parts of the sporting public that can’t quit it, won’t quit it, couldn’t imagine in a million years quitting it. It tells us too that the constant drumbeat of complaint mostly comes from a good place. That this is a sport that people adore, if it could only just get out of its own way a bit more often.

Whatever happens in Croke Park this weekend, the 2023 championship won’t go down as a vintage one. Partly, this is because it has felt from the start like a placeholder, the latest draft. Provincial competitions that were lightweight fare with heavyweight consequences, bouncing Sligo and Clare into a tournament they could have done without. Then a round-robin phase where nothing seemed to matter until the final day, when everything mattered, everywhere all at once.

All in all, it felt like 10 weeks of polite conversation that suddenly erupted into six weeks of screaming matches. As a consequence, there was more focus than ever on what it was we were watching. It was bad enough that none of this seemed to matter in the greater scheme of things — did it really have to be such a godawful eyesore into the bargain?

Bit by bit, the quality improved as the air got thinner. Teams who played with an abundance of caution tended to get their comeuppance. Roscommon went out because they messed up yet another interminable keep-ball session in injury time against Cork. Armagh probably had a higher ceiling than Monaghan but they never got around to killing off their quarter-final and paid for it in penalties.

Monaghan could only stay in the game so long against Dublin and ultimately wilted under the sort of murderous high press they would never attempt themselves. Even Derry, brilliant and all as they were against Kerry, couldn’t entirely flick the switch from the two years of nihilistic anti-football they’d been playing up to then. They scored four points in the second half of their semi-final, one of them by accident.

So in the end, it has come down to Dublin and Kerry. It’s not quite as simple as the two white knights coming along and saving the season but it’s probably not vastly more complicated either. Both counties do their fair share of massed defending and the final will feature plenty of passages with all bodies back on either side. But when all comes to all, neither side is going to hang about waiting on a slow death. It’s not in them.

As for how it will all wash out, let’s take a few random swings.

One, don’t be surprised if there’s a red card somewhere along the way. Kerry have become gradually more flinty and physical as the summer has worn on. Dublin have had a player sent off in three of their last five final matches. We know David Gough won’t shrink from a match-swinging call — just ask Jonny Cooper.

Two, we could well see at least one goal each for both sides. So much has been made of Stephen Cluxton’s run of clean sheets that it’s easy to forget Shane Ryan has had nine shutouts in his last 12 championship matches, which isn’t to be sneezed at. But neither goalkeeper has had to deal with attacks that are as ruthless and systematic as those they’ll face here. Between them, Kerry and Dublin have scored six goals in the knock-out stages — half of them have been finished to the net with the goalkeeper already beaten.

Three, Kerry are going to have to do it with what they have. Across eight matches so far, Dublin’s bench has scored 3-17 —averaging a shade over three points a game. The Kerry substitutes have contributed just five points in total over the whole championship. Two of those have come from Stephen O’Brien, who is now a starter. The other three have come from Killian Spillane, who hasn’t played since the Munster final and Ruairí Murphy, who hasn’t scored since they routed Tipperary back in May.

Will that swing the whole kit and caboodle Dublin’s way? Maybe. But Kerry have David Clifford so shouldn’t that even the whole thing out? Maybe. But Dublin have James McCarthy and Stephen Cluxton. But Kerry are defending champions and they shook the Dublin monkey off their back last year. But Pat Gilroy. But Paddy Tally. But the Hill. But history. But. But. But.

In the end, there’s a game of ball. Nothing that has gone before means a thing. There’s only now, there’s only Dublin and Kerry.

Now play.