ALL-IRELAND SFC FINAL KERRY v TYRONE:Tyrone are the last team the champions would have wanted to face at this juncture, writes Seán Moran

IN THE rush to memorialise Kilkenny's achievement in winning a third successive All-Ireland, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that Kerry are one match away from doing the same thing.

There are reasons for this. Kilkenny have broken new ground by going to the top of the roll of honour for the first time and hadn't previously won three in a row on the field of play. Kerry, on the other hand, have led football's role of honour since 1941 and won four three-in-a-row sequences.

The hurling champions are a great deal farther in front of the current field than their football counterparts and there is an acceptance that those governing circumstances won't be changing any time soon. It could be argued that for all the unease triggered by Kilkenny's absolute dominion in the MacCarthy Cup, Kerry have been leaving similarly little to chance in recent years. The county's last three All-Ireland wins have been by virtually the same cumulative margin as Kilkenny's (31 as against 33).

That would be misleading because Kerry's one-sided track record in finals obscures the essential competitiveness of the football championship. Whereas Kilkenny have never had much use for the qualifier route - none of their six All-Irelands this decade were sullied by a single defeat along the way - Kerry have been grateful for its indulgence in 2006 and not least, this year.

In fact this year's football final marks a historic juncture in the All-Ireland championships, being the first to be contested between two previously defeated teams.

This competitiveness is what maintains the football championship as the best-attended sports competition in the country. There may be poor-quality matches and questionable levels of sportsmanship but there is also a great sense of the possible about the championship that allows counties to emerge from virtually nowhere and get a run maybe all the way to Croke Park.

Few aspects of football history are as competitive as that between Kerry and Ulster. The province has a reverence for Kerry football that never stoops to obsequiousness. In the days when Mick O'Dwyer's teams ruled football, they could be guaranteed a good rattle when going north for league matches - from teams that could hardly lay a finger on them during the summer.

But the championship record between Kerry and Ulster teams is surprisingly balanced. To a far greater degree than teams from the other two provinces, northern counties have a very robust record. In fact, Ulster is the only province to be able to boast a trade surplus in All-Ireland finals with Kerry.

Unsurprisingly this has led to friction. By virtue of their historically less frequent victories and the range of winners (for example five in the last 15 years), counties from the north have tended to ascribe innovative properties to their successes, whether in terms of technical advances in training or other idiosyncratic methods of preparation.

Former Down captain Joe Lennon, a founding father in the field of modern Irish physical education and author of several coaching manuals, famously declared Kerry football 30 years behind the times.

O'Dwyer, whose playing career was blighted by Down's pioneering successes in the 1960s had a recriminatory view of the Ulster county's emergence, which was bluntly stated in the mid-1970s: "I think Down did a lot of damage to Gaelic football. They broke the ball a lot and they played it very close and marked tightly. They weren't playing the ball that much but they played the man quite a lot. I suppose it paid dividends for them. They fouled men in the centre of the field - and won All-Irelands with it. But it was not a good thing for the game."

By the time of his autobiography Blessed and Obsessed (with Martin Breheny, 2007), O'Dwyer's views hadn't changed greatly.

"On the minus side they introduced a degree of negativity, which must have been pre-planned. They had no qualms whatsoever about fouling a player well out the field.

"The free had to be taken from the ground back then giving them time to regroup, which they did most effectively. I would be the first to pay tribute to Down for the many positive and creative aspects they used such as off-the-ball running, support play, accurate passing and ball retention but there's no doubt they also exploited as much negativity as they thought they could get away with. There were no 'ticks' or yellow cards, which meant that provided the challenge wasn't of the seriously 'dirty' variety, a player could foul as much as he liked without any consequences other than giving away a free.

"Down used that to good effect so it was very difficult to build up any momentum against . . . I know they have always denied that deliberate fouling was part of their plan but I played against them often enough to suspect that it most definitely was."

Ulster teams have thwarted Kerry at significant moments in football history. It was Cavan who put a stop to Kerry's first five-in-a-row attempt by defeating them in the 1933 All-Ireland semi-final. Fourteen years later the same counties contested the historic Polo Grounds final and again Cavan were the winners. Arguably Tyrone's defeat of Kerry three years ago derailed what could have been another three-in-a-row.

That defeat together with the '03 semi-final blitz and Armagh's All-Ireland win a year previously have meant this decade has been another when northern football has forced the agenda. If the 2003 meeting was a bolt from the blue it was also a learning experience and two years later Kerry were fully confident they had absorbed the necessary lessons and so the failure to match Tyrone's speed of thought and movement was almost more demoralising.

In Kerry there is acknowledgment that, because of this recent history, Tyrone are about the last opponents the champions would have wanted to see waiting at the end of the road. It is a chance for Kerry to balance the books with Tyrone but with that opportunity comes the nagging anxiety that this is a test where history isn't on their side.

smoran@irish-times.ie