Why winning All-Irelands is different for Kerry

“DO you mind? I’ve been waiting here since half past 12,” a Kerry woman informed a Donegal man, cursed by height and stature, as he tried to unobtrusively find a place on the Nally terrace at last week’s All-Ireland final. “Well, I’ve been waiting me whole life,” he replied – but the world wouldn’t listen.

That brief exchange contained the essential difference between Kerry and Donegal last weekend; in fact, between Kerry and the rest. The rich are different. It is easy to understand why Kerry football people will savour their 37th All-Ireland title and delight in it over the coming winter.

To begin with, it is a story. From last February, when the Kingdom's resident laureate, Colm Cooper, was struck down, it became for them a story about collective resolve. It had as a central figure the imperturbable authority of Éamonn Fitzmaurice through the season's bleaker parts, the thrill of a great raid on football's last day out in Páirc Uí Chaoimh and then the mounting joy of watching another green and gold team materialise, quickly and out of nothing.

They shrugged away the defensive frailties evident in that August Sunday stroll of a quarter-final win over Galway to re-emerge against Connacht champions Mayo with a defence that seemed held together by something like titanium.

They watched David Moran, a colt for too many years, find his feet and ensure continuity between the golden generation and now. And they marvelled at the intervention of Kieran Donaghy, reborn in the last desperate minutes of the drawn semi-final against Mayo. As the Tralee man conceded in the Croke Park tunnel afterwards, he could not have foreseen it himself.

Unsurpassable drama

Add to that the unsurpassable drama of the extra-time thriller in Limerick and the cognoscenti suddenly discovered that 2014, against all expectations, was shaping up to be an exceptional vintage. Once they reached September, they began to relax. Once they got to the All-Ireland final, they were quietly convinced that it would be business as usual.

Last Sunday, this Kerry team faced a resilient and battle hardened Donegal team that possesses much more football subtlety and skill than they are often given credit for.

As predicted, Kerry set themselves up to negate the counter-attacking potency of the Ulster champions and declined to carry the ball into the Donegal defence, which has more light-fingered pickpockets per square metre than anywhere except the Trevi fountain in high season.

Kerry played smart and cagey, and lived on their wits. Donegal got unlucky for Kerry's first goal when a deflected pass fell perfectly for Paul Geaney, but the Kerry man's finish was ice cold.

Donegal got horribly unlucky for the second goal, but Donaghy looked like the least surprised man in the stadium when Paul Durcan’s freakishly unfortunate kick-out bounced into his path. That’s because Donaghy, like all Kerry players, is conditioned to think that good things must happen to Kerry in All-Ireland finals. Potential Kerry footballers are raised to think of All-Ireland finals not as some vaguely promised maybe-land but as the natural outcome of wearing the Kerry shirt. On some level, that matters.

This season will reinforce that iron-cast Kerry mentality – and the mythology – as much as any nostalgic footage of Mikey Sheehy and Eoin “Bomber” Liston terrorising opposition defences.

During this season, Liston, in his newspaper column, was one of the first to draw attention to the fact that Donegal meant business. Speaking on the radio on the eve of the All-Ireland final, he declared he would be attending the match more in hope than conviction that Kerry could win. But this week, he was at liberty to admit he had privately fancied the home county all the way through, so much so that he had placed a wager on them after the Munster final.

‘Off the mark’

When Éamonn Fitzmaurice told the Kerry public “we are off the mark”, he was on one level maintaining an understated confidence that never wavered when results and odds seemed stacked against his team. But it also transmitted a message which spread quickly through the rest of the counties, in particular to those with ambitions and plans to win the Sam Maguire over the coming years. When Tomás Ó Sé writes that he realised, watching Kerry celebrate the last day, that Kerry will never go away as a football force, it is because he means it.

Winning All-Irelands for Kerry is different. The immediate elation may not be quite as intense as experienced in counties whose teams win it perhaps once in a generation. But upholding a tradition and keeping the story going, that is what matters.

For a fraternity that likes to venerate its past, Kerry football people keep a cold eye on the future. For decades, Kerry have been held to the notion that they are, somehow, custodians of the game. Perhaps that role was self-appointed, but, more than any other county, they have been saddled with the duty of playing Gaelic football in a “certain way”.

Any criticism Kerry received for setting up defensively in the All-Ireland final is bunk. The game is the game is the game: it shapeshifts and evolves, and all teams must adapt. For Kerry to just go out last Sunday and play old-style 3-3-2-3-3 ball would not just have been foolhardy, it would have been presumptuous. Even with the new approach, the old virtues – high fielding and devastatingly accurate 30-metre kick passes, hardness, coolness and know-how – were there in abundance.

Losing with class

Donegal did the one thing they didn’t want to have to do on Sunday evening. They demonstrated they know how to lose with class. They were wan and inhibited for much of Sunday but still came within a ball slapped against the post of having a shot at redemption.

Afterwards, they all said they couldn’t put their finger on what had gone wrong. Playing an All-Ireland final is one thing; maybe playing Kerry is another. The torture for Donegal, the demon they must make peace with, is that they can’t get that hour back now.

On the bright side, they remain one of the best teams in the country and have, in Jim McGuinness, a rare manager who has provoked them into an extraordinary journey which need not be over yet.

Will they be back? That is one of the unknowns. Administrative war has broken out in Mayo and Cork are nursing a year of serious disappointment. Up in Armagh, Kieran McGeeney is marshalling his squad and, of course, Dublin loom on the horizon, already favourites for 2015.

The old contest is as open as it has ever been. But Kerry have recaptured the old hauteur now. And they’re saying Colm Cooper is looking sharp, mind . . .