GAELIC GAMES:THE LOST weekend. It has been a flat and forgettable football championship so far this year and, with the exception of perhaps one glorious half an hour, the four games at Croke Park on Saturday and Sunday seemed designed to showcase all that is tedious about football just now. People stayed away in their droves.
The highlight in terms of intensity and quality came at the end when Kerry and Monaghan justified their billing as the weekend's headliners with a game of white- hot intensity, some sustained tension and lots of aggression. It wasn't a spectacle for the purists but one assumes the purists were in rehab by four o'clock yesterday afternoon.
Kerry, inevitably and inexorably, advance to the latter stages of yet another All-Ireland championship. They have looked jittery and stuttery this summer and have been distracted by the Paul Galvin business and the pressures of the three-in-a-row. This was the sort of game they needed and if Kerry march on and pull down the first three-in-a-row since the generation some of their fathers and uncles belonged to in the 80s, they will look back on this game as a turning point in a tough season.
Yesterday they faced Monaghan, the side who came closest last year to ensuring the three-in-a-row was just a castle in the air. Since that failed coup, Monaghan have looked like a side slightly uncomfortable with the limelight and yesterday they felt the pressure almost as much as Kerry did. But for most of the game they pushed Kerry to the limit and with a little more confidence would have stolen the day.
A goal miss by Ciarán Hanratty with less then 20 minutes left at a time when the sides were level will nourish discussion of what might have been for the Farney county.
But Kerry got the next three scores, two of them from the immensely influential Kieran Donaghy, first a point and then a goal.
Kerry, oddly for a team looking for a third All-Ireland in succession, are a work in progress at the moment. The jury is still out on players like Tommy Walsh, Donnacha Walsh and Séamus Scanlon.
Yesterday Walsh showed his pedigree with a fine hard-working performance that brought him two points but it was the old hands who rescued Kerry in the end.
The game's only goal from Donaghy was set up by Eoin Brosnan, and a last-minute catch by Darragh Ó Sé, hauling the ball down under his own crossbar in this his 70th championship game, ended Monaghan's hopes.
"It was touch and go," said Donaghy, whose second-half goal inserted some daylight between the sides, "and we knew that would be the way against Monaghan and I knew if I got a chance, I knew if we got a goal we would open the game. If we let them hang around we would be facing the same scenario as last year.
"We opened up that five-point gap and I had confidence in our back line that we could hold out and thankfully they did. It took Darragh Ó Sé to grab a ball in the 74th minute to save the day.
"We knew this was exactly what we needed - a good game against a good team. We have a lot to work on. Six points for us from our forwards in the first half is not near our target or where we wanted to be. We have loads to work on but I would be just hoping that the fans get behind us for the quarter-finals. This team is going for three-in-a-row and every game is going to be huge."
The quality of Kerry's win and Monaghan's resistance was a relief on a weekend when teams had tended to go under as if chloroformed. On Saturday, Wexford bundled a surprisingly passive Down side out the door and then Tyrone had merely to wait for Mayo to perform their traditional implosion trick to advance to the quarter-finals themselves.
The undercard yesterday featured Fermanagh and Kildare, perhaps the least touted of the weekends pairings and somehow (it seemed unlikely on Saturday night this title could be even contested) the worst game of the weekend.
The game started with a 25-minute scoreless period, a period which played out like an improvised jazz solo the novelty of which had worn thin by the time it finished. Kildare broke the spell and restored the normal rhythm of things with a point by their centre forward Pádraig O'Neill.
Kildare at least took to the notion of scoring. Fermanagh still seemed dubious about the idea and restricted themselves to just five points before the end.
It was one of those days for Fermanagh when nothing went well. They spurned an excellent goal chance midway through the second half when the score would have put them a point up. Sensing how expensive that miss would be, they then let Kildare in for the next four points of the game.
For Kildare, progress to the quarter-finals represents their best run in the championship since they lost to Galway in the semi-final back in 2000.
For Kieran McGeeney, in his first championship season as an intercounty manager, there was no option but to concede the poor quality of much of what had gone before but to emphasise the result.
"As a manager I'm happy with the result and the football we played in the second half. There was probably a wee bit of nerves in the camp; we haven't been this far in the competition for a long time and the build-up to the game was more than we are used to.
"And in fairness to Fermanagh they put you under pressure when you go to shoot and they are getting the tackles in. But it just wasn't to be their day."
Onward then the championship rolls. The rarefied air of the quarter-finals will hopefully bring an improvement in quality and perhaps a little boost to attendances.
