About 15 minutes after the 2023 All-Ireland final, Tony Griffin made his way on to the pitch and sat next to David Clifford, just the two of them. The golden streamers had risen and fallen, and the Dublin players were larking with the Sam Maguire. The pat line trotted out is that every team wins together and loses together. It is not true.
Clifford lives on the equator between winning and losing. He is never estranged from the outcome. Dublin had won the All-Ireland partly because of what Clifford had failed to do. Well-meaning people could implore him not to see it that way, and to forgive himself, but greatness is a hall of screaming mirrors. Sitting on the pitch, the outcome was spray-painted on his face, like graffiti.
Griffin was the Kerry performance coach. In his playing career, and at a different altitude, he had experienced failure in an All-Ireland final with the Clare hurlers; that day, by his own reckoning, he had fallen short.
“I remember standing there and watching this,” Griffin says now. “In the role I had with Kerry my dance constantly was not becoming attached to the outcome. That’s very easy to say but when you’re so involved and you’re so close, that can fray a little bit.
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“I had this flashback to the All-Ireland final in 2002 when Kilkenny beat us and sitting on the pitch knowing that I hadn’t played to my potential. I think I scored two points, but Peter Barry had outfoxed me completely and I remember the feeling of wanting the ground to open up.
“I could see David was going to have a winter of regret. I didn’t even think about it. Before I knew it, I was sitting beside him. I just remember saying to myself, ‘Don’t put your arm around him. That’s too much. David doesn’t want that.’”
In the 2023 final, Clifford kicked two points from play and one from a free. He also kicked four wides, had a shot drop short and missed another when the referee was playing an advantage. Two of his wides came in quick succession in the middle of the second half when the scores were level and the game was open to the highest bidder.
Clifford’s conversion rate in the championship had been 62 per cent; in the final it was half that. In the other column of the ledger, he had made Kerry’s goal with a pass borne of heightened imagination. He had assisted two points as well, but he couldn’t balance the books, even if breaking even would have been enough.
[ The obvious way Donegal can be beaten by Kerry is ... David CliffordOpens in new window ]
In the press conference afterwards, Jack O’Connor was asked a question about Clifford’s contribution that was both unspecific and loaded. “I’m not sure what the premise of the question is,” O’Connor snapped. He understood the premise. The Kerry manager wasn’t asked about the performance of any other Kerry player. No other Kerry player mattered as much to the outcome.
This will be Clifford’s fourth All-Ireland final, or fifth if you include the replay in 2019. For great forwards especially, All-Ireland finals are days of reckoning. Other games are too easily forgotten, or too easily reduced. All-Ireland finals have a permanence, a matter of public notice and collective recall.
In Kerry football, everything has a line of succession. If Clifford is the high king of forwards, he is not the first from the kingdom to wear the crown. The overbearing difference for him is the weight of expectation. On most All-Ireland winning Kerry teams of the last 50 years, the pressure to score was shared more widely, and sometimes generously. There was more than one tip to the spear.
In the eight finals that Kerry won under Mick O’Dwyer, for example, five different players were either top scorer or joint top scorer from play: Mikey Sheehy, Eoin “Bomber” Liston, John Egan, Pat Spillane and Jack O’Shea. Sheehy held that distinction three times, but so did Spillane. In those years, it was never enough to spike one or two of Kerry’s guns.
“There was no particular forward that we were depending on any day,” says Jack O’Shea. “There was always somebody going to do it. You weren’t dependent on one player.”
For well over a decade Colm Cooper’s brilliance illuminated the Kerry attack and excited all kinds of defensive manoeuvres. He won four All-Irelands on the field and another as an unused sub in 2014 when he had just recovered from a serious knee injury. Cooper was top scorer from play in the first All-Ireland final he won in 2004, but he shared that distinction with Declan O’Sullivan and Kieran Donaghy two years after that, and with Donaghy in 2007.
In 2009, when Kerry beat Cork in the final, Cooper failed to score from play. It didn’t matter. Tommy Walsh kicked four points and others picked up the slack.
“Gooch was surrounded by Declan O’Sullivan, who was a great player,” says Dara Ó Cinnéide, “and then by Kieran Donaghy in a lot of years. In his early years, there was myself or John Crowley or Mike Frank [Russell] – we’d always chip in.
“But there was an even spread. As exceptional as Gooch was the gap between Gooch and the rest of the forwards wouldn’t have been as big as the gap, say, between Maurice Fitzgerald and the rest of the forwards in 1997.”
The burden that Fitzgerald carried is the nearest thing to the weight on Clifford’s shoulders now. By 1997, Kerry hadn’t won an All-Ireland in 11 years, the longest hiatus in their history. Throughout the 1990s, though, Fitzgerald was the only chance they had of winning.
“We got lucky in ’97 that he had the day of days,” says Ó Cinnéide. “He kicked nine points, [four from play]. If that doesn’t happen, we don’t win the All-Ireland. There’s one point he gets, I remember watching it after, but I’m actually running towards the corner flag out of his way. It wasn’t even a tactic that time. I was running to the corner flag so that he has a one-on-one. He was that good.”
There have always been marked men. Donaghy was different from the others because scoring wasn’t his primary role – even though he had a poacher’s flair. There were years, though, when Kerry’s opponents were obsessed with keeping the ball out of his hands. In the Kerry attack, Donaghy was the oxygen valve.
“To be honest,” Donaghy says, “I quite enjoyed it. I won’t lie. I enjoyed that bit of pressure because I knew it would potentially bring out the best in me. I would have looked forward to it. I liked the idea of that bit of weight on the shoulders and having to perform – knowing that I had to perform.”
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Clifford is in that space, except that in Clifford’s case the pressure to perform is not mediated by scenarios in which Kerry could win without his influence. He cannot deflect that, even if he had a mind to.
“I asked the question when I got involved,” says Griffin. “‘How does he carry the burden?’ He was always the easiest narrative. The easiest story for everyone was David. I asked one of the lads and he said, ‘Yeah, but he’s been David Clifford since he was 13.’ Lads would come down from the north to a Kerry under-14 match or under-16 match to watch him. He was just used to it.
“He doesn’t think about it in terms of, ‘I’m carrying the weight.’ He’s like a lot of high-performers, he can manage a dual process. He can feel the nerves and have a certain amount of trust in himself.”
Clifford was only 20 when he played in his first senior All-Ireland against Dublin in 2019. Jonny Cooper, his marker, was sent off before half-time on two yellow cards. In the aftermath Jim Gavin was asked if he regretted not moving Cooper after his first booking. “No,” Gavin said, oddly, without a word of elaboration. Maybe ‘no’ sometimes means ‘yes.’
In the replay Mick Fitzsimons picked him up, just as he did in 2023. But Clifford burned him for three points in the first half, and Fitzsimons finished the game marking Paul Geaney. Three Dublin players kicked four points from play that day; on a beaten team, Clifford matched them.
Clifford’s next final, against Galway in 2022, was a tour de force. From nine shots he landed eight points. In the first half, when Kerry’s shooting was atrocious, he kept them in the game and when the teams were level after 67 minutes, he kicked a clutch free from a prohibitive angle. Clifford had won the All-Ireland for Kerry, just as Maurice Fitzgerald had done in 1997. This was his mission.
The following year was tough. By January 2023, he had played 34 championship matches in six different competitions over the previous 12 months. His form was depressed by fatigue and then in May, on the weekend of the Munster final, his mother passed away. By the time Kerry reached the All-Ireland final against Dublin, he was a shadow of the player who had taken the fight to Galway a year earlier.
“That year was a big, big mental load for any human being,” said Griffin a few months after the final. “I don’t care who you are, you can only push things away so much and try to perform. The All-Ireland final probably showed that David has areas of his game that need work. Everyone says he’s the complete player. He knows he’s not. And he knows his ‘complete’ is different to most other people’s complete. But that’s what he’s after. It’s Michael Jordan-esque.”
Clifford is still on that road. Better now than he was before his worst final two years ago and his best final three years ago.
“There was never as much pressure on a player going into an All-Ireland final,” says Ó Cinnéide, “but I’m not concerned about it. The zone that he’s in at the moment, the body shape that he’s in, I’m not concerned he’ll have a bad game.”
Clifford made the pressure too. It couldn’t exist without all the things he has done. These are the terms. He agreed.
