THE MIDDLE THIRD:The Kingdom have a clear edge in terms of class and experience and, if you match their best players up against Dublin's best, they look too strong for Gilroy's men
“Colm Cooper is 28 and this will be his eighth All-Ireland final. Bernard Brogan is 27 and this will be his first. Not one of the Dublin players is able to say they’ve come out of the tunnel for an All-Ireland final with millions of people tuning in from all around the world
FOR A player, the week of an All-Ireland final is about nothing else only getting your head right. Everything else is done now. You won’t get any fitter, you won’t get any lighter or heavier, there’s nothing more for you to prepare only your own mindset. The management have worked on the game plan and told you your role in it so your job now is just to make sure you’re ready come 3.30pm on Sunday.
Above all, you want to avoid people this week. You will set up your week so you don’t come into contact with anybody who wants to talk to you. You don’t need to be told by anyone in the street how well you’re going to play or how good you’ve been all year.
It’s of no benefit to you to stop and chat about the game, no matter if it’s with people you’ve known all your life or just well-meaning people looking to give you a gee-up. You don’t want to hear it. You just want to get away to get your head right.
I always went off for a walk. I’d head away off on my own and get my head right. Let everything else fall away and just get the game itself into my head.
Who will I be marking?
How will I try to combat his game and upset his rhythm?
What will I do in the first five minutes to impose myself on him?
What will I do when the game settles down?
It’s the one game of the year where you have no choice but to sort all this stuff out in your head beforehand. Because a final is different, totally different from every other game in the year. There’s no shadow boxing, no holding something up your sleeve that you might use later on.
The gloves are off and it’s helter-skelter from the start. If you don’t have your head around it from the throw-in or if you just try to ease yourself into it, you’ll find 20 minutes have gone and the game has passed you by.
You have to be in a heightened state almost, right from the outset. The pace of the final has gone through the roof over the past few years, especially the opening minutes. I definitely felt that in the last final I played in a couple of years ago and I suppose if you were looking to pick holes in this Kerry team for Sunday, there might be a few of them approaching that point in their careers. Certainly the Kerry age-profile is higher than Dublin’s and that could be a factor if the opening stages are frantic.
But the flip-side of that is the experience these lads have. They will know if they hang tight for those first 15 minutes and do the simple things right when they’re on the ball, the game will settle down eventually. All the frenzy of the opening is down to fellas being mad to get a touch of the ball, desperate to be able to say to themselves that they’re part of the final.
The advantage Kerry will have is that they’ve done this before so many times. They will be more ready for it.
I’m not saying they won’t be nervous because they will. You have to be purely because the prize is so great. This is the biggest game of their lives but with the exception of Brendan Kealy and Kieran O’Leary, they’ve all played in it before.
Put it this way – Colm Cooper is 28 and this will be his eighth All-Ireland final. Bernard Brogan is 27 and this will be his first. Not one of the Dublin players is able to say they’ve come out of the tunnel for an All-Ireland final with millions of people tuning in from all around the world. That has to count in Kerry’s favour.
At this point in some of these Kerry players’ careers, an All-Ireland final has to be approached in a clinical way. For lads like Tom O’Sullivan, Tomás Ó Sé, Marc Ó Sé, Aidan O’Mahony and Paul Galvin – even for the lads who aren’t 30 yet like Declan O’Sullivan, Kieran Donaghy and the Gooch – this final is about business.
You take the emotion out of it, you ignore all the talk and hype and whatever else and you strip it down to brass tacks. This is work. This is about gathering up as many medals as you can before you go out the door for the last time.
Kerry’s only danger from a mental standpoint is complacency. Not complacency about Dublin – I don’t see that happening at all since there’s no doubt these are the two best teams in the country. No, what I mean is complacency about the occasion.
Kerry will have to guard against taking it for granted that they’ll rise to the occasion because they’ve done it before. That’s why you put the work in this week to get your head around what’s ahead of you.
It isn’t really enjoyable work but you have to do it. All-Ireland finals aren’t to be enjoyed. I never enjoyed them anyway. I know some fellas did and can but I was never one of them. I was just too nervous. I found the best way to get a performance out of myself was to put myself under pressure.
The enjoyable part I found was creating that pressure for myself and then performing under it. Once I could come away from it feeling that I had created this situation and then risen to it, then I could enjoy it.
That’s the high, right there.
Funny enough, the high goes away very quickly afterwards. When it’s over, it’s over. The aftermath never lasts anywhere near as long as the build-up.
But the ones you lose stay with you a lot longer than the ones you win.
That’s just the nature of it, you wouldn’t be the type of person to make it to a final if you weren’t hard on yourself after losing.
The other strange thing is that when you watch the game back on television afterwards, it rarely looks like the game you thought you were playing in.
You might have thought you scored a lovely point on the run from a nice angle and wheeled away shaking your fist at the crowd only to find out when you watch The Sunday Game that all you did was kick it over the bar from 30 yards out in front of the posts. Your team-mates won’t spare you, be sure of that!
The match-ups will be fascinating on Sunday. Dublin’s dangermen are obvious for everyone to see so I expect Kerry to put their best men on them. Killian Young will probably follow Alan Brogan wherever he goes, Marc Ó Sé will take Bernard Brogan and Tom O’Sullivan will most likely go onto Diarmuid Connolly.
It will be interesting to see what Dublin do with Bryan Cullen and Paul Flynn. If they drop back into defence like they have been doing, the Kerry half-backs will have a lot of space to run into, just like they had against Mayo.
One thing Jack O’Connor likes to do when he’s drawing up a game plan is to attack a team at its strongest point. When we played Dublin in the quarter-final in 2009, we focused on Stephen Cluxton’s kick-outs.
They were the launching pad for everything Dublin did and so we collectively pushed right up on them every time he put the ball down. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see it again on Sunday.
It isn’t easy. It takes huge work and huge concentration from everybody.
It’s not something that one man or even one line can do by themselves – you basically need all 11 players from the forwards, the midfielders and the half-backs to be completely alert and aggressive about the space in front of them every time the ball goes wide or for a score.
You won’t stop them coming out with the ball every time but if you can even just cut in half the amount of good ball they have to launch attacks with, you make them think again. Definitely in 2009, I remember it causing consternation in the ranks.
Two years on, Dublin will obviously have moved on from that and will have something ready if Kerry do it again. There’ll be second-guessing all over the pitch and subplots to everything. That’s what makes it such a mouth-watering game.
In the end, I fancy Kerry to take it. I just think that if you match their best players up against Dublin’s best, they will have too much in their locker. Bernard Brogan is a great player and, as I wrote here a couple of weeks ago, his semi-final performance sent him way up in my estimation.
But would I take him over Colm Cooper? I wouldn’t.
The same goes for Declan O’Sullivan and Alan Brogan.
Coming down the stretch, Kerry will have the extra bit of experience and class. We can’t forget either that this is Pat Gilroy’s first final as a manager whereas it’s Jack O’Connor’s fifth.
The Kerry management have got just about everything right so far this year, even during games like changing the emphasis in the second half against Mayo away from the high ball into Kieran Donaghy. You would have to be confident Jack and his selectors will get the big calls right again on Sunday.
Dublin will bring a huge amount of pace to the game and Kerry will have to withstand that. They will have to soak it all up and then see where they are. It could almost be a bit of a rope-a-dope job from Kerry, where they let Dublin punch themselves out in the early part of the game before coming after them in the run-up to half-time.
Easier said than done but I do think Kerry have it in them. I’d like to see them getting Declan O’Sullivan to play closer to the goal than he has been doing, and as well as that getting Donaghy more into the game. This is a big week for Kieran because he’s had a poor summer and he needs to put himself under pressure to perform.
There’s no room for error now and if he isn’t doing well in front of goal, he needs to come out and win ball around midfield.
Anything to impose himself on the game, anything to make an impact. Because after this, you don’t get another go at this game for a year.
If that isn’t enough to motivate you, you shouldn’t be here.
Kerry to win by five or six points.
