THE MIDDLE THIRD:You know the championship is back when you see a fella on the terrace with a four-cornered knotted hankie on his head to keep the sun at bay!
IN CARLOW last Sunday, I saw something I hadn’t seen in years. Looking around me before the game on a blazing hot day, I saw a fella below on the terrace with a four-cornered knotted hankie on his head to keep the sun at bay. I thought they went out in the ’70s! You know the championship is back when you see something out of Reeling In The Years right in front of you.
One of the perks of being retired and getting to go to more games than I did as a player is that I’m forever finding myself in places I never was before. I had heard of Dr Cullen Park obviously but I’d never been there.
Just walking into the place, you got a feel for the championship. You had two sets of supporters from Meath and Wicklow and every one of them was nervous and on edge walking into this lovely little ground on the edge of Carlow town.
Both sides were right to be nervous. Meath people were nervous because people were tipping them to lose and Wicklow people were nervous because people were tipping them to win.
And the way Wicklow tore into the game, going five points up early on, told you it was definitely on the cards. In the end, Meath came through it but it was enjoyable to watch Wicklow giving them plenty of it. The football wasn’t great from either side but that’s to be expected the first day out.
The first day of the championship is about nothing more than getting through the first day of the championship. Meath and Wicklow both played decent stuff in spells, just the same as Kerry and Tipperary were doing in Thurles. But it was mostly first-day football, full of mistakes and breakdowns in communication and bad wides from players taking the wrong shots.
One thing that stood out in the Meath v Wicklow game was that any bit of pressure on the ball usually led to it being turned over and possession being lost. That’s a sure sign players aren’t thinking quickly enough yet to avoid putting themselves or their team-mates into awkward situations. When you hear fellas talking about a lack of sharpness or being bit rusty, this is what it translates to on the field.
At one point in the first half on Sunday, Meath full-back Kevin Reilly came over to take a sideline ball. For a lot of his career, I would have associated Kevin with what you’d call a Meath clearance – get out and get it long. But as he had the ball in his hands, you could see in him the last thing he wanted to do was just lump it long down the field. He was in trouble, though, because a lot of the Meath players had their backs to him and he was getting nothing from anyone coming short either. So he ended up having to hoof it out into the middle of the field where James Stafford won it for Wicklow and they scored an easy point.
It was real first-day stuff. Anybody could see that Reilly didn’t want to be just kicking long but nobody came to help him. What should have happened there was that his goalkeeper should have just come over and taken a short pass from Reilly and then given it back to him so that Meath could get moving up the pitch. A very simple one-two would have kept possession and calmed the nerves. But they made a mess of it.
In the first round, players are coming in a bit blind. They haven’t played any serious football since the end of the league so they’re not going back over things and working on specific areas. Or if they are, they’re maybe not just as concentrated on them because challenge matches don’t give you the full picture. Every team does video analysis these days and it is most effective when you take something that happened in a recent game, you work it out and you fix it. But with the best will in the world, video analysis of challenge matches is only going to be worth so much to you.
Now, think of the video analysis the Meath players will be able to do before they meet Carlow. When you win, even the mistakes can be a way of building a bit of team spirit. They’ll be able to sit down and do a bit of sniggering when they go through what went wrong when Reilly went over to take that sideline ball. They can have a laugh about it but at the same time go: “Right lads, next time there’s a line-ball in the full-back line, here’s what we do.” And they can design one or two plays to create some space – be it the goalkeeper’s job or one of the midfielders’ or whoever.
The point is, nobody looks good the first day out. Meath didn’t, Kerry didn’t, even Longford didn’t play their best stuff when they were beating Laois. Each team comes to the first game with no greater ambition than getting through it. There’s always going to be a world of mistakes but as long as you win, the shackles come off and everybody in the squad is relieved afterwards.
It’s never a bad thing for a coach to get through the first game and be able to tell the players they were lucky to get away with it. They’ll go back and he’ll sit them down and watch the video and go, “Jesus lads, that was shocking stuff. I’m not making this up – it’s here in front of ye on the screen.”
And finally, after weeks of shadow-boxing and challenge matches, they will have something concrete to work on.
That’s why I think you’ll see massive improvement in Meath by the time they meet Carlow. After all the heat that was on Banty, they can knuckle down and get a bit of momentum going. They’re not good enough to trouble the later stages of the championship but they can make a run in Leinster and have a good cut off Kildare if both teams win their next game. They will have to kick the ball more than they did on Sunday when they were forever carrying it into tackles and losing it cheaply.
I was a bit surprised Kerry were so lethargic on Sunday because with the game coming so close to the Munster semi-final against Cork, I would have expected them to have been more fine-tuned than that. Kerry have two sessions to turn it around and find a bit of form.
After a game played in the sort of heat there was in Thurles, there’d be no training done on the Tuesday night. They’ll have one tomorrow night and another on the weekend and that will be that. Anything that has to be fixed will have to be found in those two sessions. It’s cutting things a bit finer than they’d like I’d say.
Even so, the bad day out was still most likely just a symptom of it being the first round of the championship. I played in plenty of those games early in the Munster championship where you were going out on to the field knowing you were going to win. We played Waterford in Killarney in 2006 and although we won by a similar score to what Kerry beat Tipperary by on Sunday, it was one of those days where no Kerry player could come off the pitch able to say he played well. Except maybe Séamus Moynihan, who played the same no matter who the opposition was.
Anyone looking at us that day would have been shaking their heads and wondering what made people think we were any use at all. The more we tried, the more it went against us. Passes went astray, balls were dropped, we were either rushing shots or taking too long over them. We weren’t in any way impressive. By September we were All-Ireland champions.
It just happens. The gap between the league and the championship drags on and you lose whatever bit of sharpness you had in you. Managers will take the opportunity to get some heavy physical training done in that period as well so the challenge games will be played at half-pace because some guys will have the legs hanging off them. Come that first day of the championship, it’s impossible for everything to fall into place straight away.
And look, no matter what anyone says, Tipperary v Kerry is not the same as Cork v Kerry. No matter how good your attitude is, as a Kerry player you will have that underlying belief that you’ll get through it against Tipperary. Even when things are going wrong for you on the pitch, you’ll be saying to yourself: “Look, we’ll get over the line here. We’ll get our shit together before the next day.” That’s the reality of it.
So even when Tipperary had that free on Sunday to bring it back to a point, if you were a Kerry player on that pitch, you weren’t worried. You would have been annoyed, you would have been determined to put it right but you still would have known that somebody was going to pick up the slack and get you over the line.
That won’t be the case on Sunday week against Cork and everybody knows it. So the whole attitude will change without Jack O’Connor having to say a thing about it.
At the start of the summer, the contenders look fairly predictable. You have Kerry and Cork, you have Dublin and probably Kildare. Donegal are the kind of side who probably won’t win it but who you can very easily see stopping someone else winning it.
I’d have Dublin and Cork a step ahead of the rest with Kerry next and Kildare after that. If the All-Ireland winner comes from outside that group, we’ll have had a pretty surprising championship.
