Kerry have not always been successful in settling scores with their bête noirs, writes Seán Moran

THERE HAS been an assumption underlying the run-up to this weekend's All-Ireland final that Kerry always settle scores. After a rough couple of years at the hands of Armagh and Tyrone at the start of the decade, Kerry won the 2004 All-Ireland, thrashing Mayo.

"The right order is restored and Sam Maguire is back in the Kingdom," the chairman of the county board, Seán Walsh, told jubilant crowds in Tralee for the homecoming.

The most recent evidence of the county exacting direct retribution is the All-Ireland quarter-final win over Armagh two years ago when the newly unveiled target-man attack led by Kieran Donaghy played an influential role in securing a measure of revenge for the 2002 All-Ireland defeat.

It should be a motivation on Sunday that Tyrone have beaten the champions twice already this decade but history doesn't indicate that this is an inevitability.

In the 1970s it was Mick O'Dwyer's Kerry team that drew first blood against Kevin Heffernan's Dublin in 1975 only to lose the next two championship clashes before their older rivals ran out of steam at the end of the decade.

More strikingly, a few cold dishes of revenge went uneaten in the 1960s. Three defeats by Down (the only county with a 100 per cent championship record against Kerry) were unavenged and even the two failures against Galway in the middle of the decade weren't overturned until the faintly irrelevant stage of 18 years later.

Sunday is different because the rivalry is still fresh and many of the same players are involved. It's just five years since Mickey Harte's team ate Kerry without salt in the All-Ireland semi-final. The abiding images of Kerry players surrounded by swarming defenders obscures how close the match was at one stage but overall it was an emphatic win.

Kerry were disoriented by the energy of Tyrone and the pace at which they moved the ball. Coming as it did less than 12 months after the All-Ireland setback against Armagh, the defeat triggered memories of the dark years when Kerry couldn't get to grips with Down's new style of football.

Two years later Jack O'Connor, who delivered the 2004 All-Ireland in his first year as manager, gave his recollections of that afternoon: "Watching Tyrone win the All-Ireland one thing stood out. They were working a lot harder. Kerry were going to have to work harder when they didn't have the ball. Unless you're prepared to match Tyrone's work rate you can't take the game any further.

"The other thing was that I wanted them to come out and express themselves. A lot of the backs have a lot of football and I wanted them to join in when the ball was coming out."

O'Connor built a team that reflected those lessons and Kerry believed they had done enough to set the record straight against Tyrone in the 2005 final.

That didn't happen and after 35 or 40 minutes of trying to match the Ulster side's pace and combination play Kerry flagged to an extent not altogether evident in a three-point defeat.

It was the first time that Kerry had lost two successive All-Ireland matches to the same opposition since Dublin in the famous 1977 semi-final.

One of the reasons this year's final is so eagerly awaited is that the champions haven't played Tyrone since the Donaghy-configured attack was unveiled. This year Tommy Walsh has added a second beacon to the full forward line and it's clear that the traditional catch-and-kick will be a major weapon in settling old scores.