ALL-IRELAND SFC QUARTER-FINAL KERRY v DUBLINBEHOLD KERRY. The joyless busted flushes of the football championship. This year's beaten dockets and whipped curs. Slouching into Croke Park behind their know-nothing, haydog manager Jack O'Connor. More to be pitied than laughed at.
Is that freckled ghost popping the ball into the Dublin net there on 40 seconds, is that The Gooch? Or the oldest living man, Darragh Ó Sé? Can that be him cleaning up at midfield? That retread at centre back? Mike McCarthy! Look at them boozed up and wiped out and arguing with their toenails. Somebody put them out of their misery.
Blue Monday. The long and tangled football history of Dublin and Kerry served as drum roll and prelude to yesterday and yet and yet . . . What unfolded at Croke Park wasn’t a spectacle it was an ambush. We ordered a classic. Kerry delivered a quarter-final massacre, coldly mowing down the Dubs, winning by 17 points and then turning the guns on their critics.
Just about everybody except Jack O’Connor and the boys got this one wrong. Yesterday’s All-Ireland quarter-final was to be a passing of the flame not an immolation. Kerry got their tactics right. Confused Dublin’s marking plan with a few switches. Took away the hindwind that a good start always gives the Blues. Closed down Dublin’s quick kick-outs. That was all it took.
“Where did that come from?”O’Connor was asked when it was all over. “Tells ye how much ye know!” said Jack with a smile.
Kerry led from start to finish. In between they shaved years off their football age, turning in a rip-roaring 70 minutes of football which catapulted them from the ranks of the dead and back to the world of the live contender. They chloroformed the Dubs, tranquillised the Hill. Took the train home. Bloody typical.
The aftermath? Dublin, for whom every venture into the month of August seems freighted with promise, end up as a train wreck yet again. Five provincial titles on the trot. Two All-Ireland semi-final appearances. Yesterday the navy pants hit the canvas almost as soon as the opening bell had sounded. Colm Cooper caught and swivelled on a ball before 40 seconds had elapsed. Stuck it in the Dublin net.
Remarkably, Dublin never recovered. Their best flashes comprise a slim volume and were moments of reprieve from the bewildering onslaught. Kerry, who have yet to lose a quarter-final since the genre was invented, rolled on. They have Mayo or Meath awaiting them in a semi-final. On yesterday’s evidence they could beat the best of both sides and reach their sixth final in a row.
They played all of the game without their totem Kieran Donaghy and most of it without Tommy Walsh, who was withdrawn on the half hour. They scored freely and could have had a hatful of goals to add to Cooper’s early contribution.
It was performance without mercy. That of a stung team which had read too much about its demise and heard too much about internal fractures. It was a performance for the record, a dismissive slapdown of this year’s favourites. A declaration.
Kerry are still Kerry.
All over the pitch there were men reclaiming their reputations and their football vigour. None more so than Darragh Ó Sé in midfield. The Gaeltacht man lives for these days and having dominated the first quarter of an hour to the extent that Dublin removed Darren Magee, you could sense Ó Sé’s warrior-like joy at the sight of Ciarán Whelan entering the fray.
Behind him Mike McCarthy has stepped out of retirement and into the centre-back role like a man with the ability to suspend time. He was immense yesterday. As was Colm Cooper, a man who came to Croke Park with a great future behind him, we felt.
Kerry have four weeks now in which to prepare for an All-Ireland semi-final. Four weeks in which the competition for places will at last be palpable. Kieran Donaghy, as energetic and interventionist a water carrier as Croke Park has seen, will be fit surely.
Players like Daniel Bohan, Anthony Maher, Paul O’Connor and Barry John Walsh will step up the challenge for places. In Fitzgerald Stadium that is what they like the best. No comfort zone. Everybody on edge battling for the chance to play in Croke Park.
For Dublin, meanwhile, it is back to the drawing board. Croke Park looked like a lonely place yesterday for Pat Gilroy, a man reared in the best traditions of Dublin football.
Kerry are the windmill against which every Dublin manager tilts, the mountain top that every Dublin manager dreams of. Any All-Ireland where you beat Kerry is a double All-Ireland Kevin Heffernan used to say.
“These things happen in sport. We are only human beings after all. It sometimes happens with guys. It happened today. We expected Kerry to be brilliant today. It never happened for us. We never got on the ball. We never got into the game. Nowhere were we on top,” said Gilroy.
Dublin came to Croke Park yesterday with as much right to dream as any of their predecessors have had. They went home with just one consolation. They weren’t beaten on Irish soil. Kerry on yesterday’s form, though, are any team’s worst nightmare, anywhere and any day.
The men they couldn’t hang.
