Kerry’s kids need to be men before they can hurt Dubs
ALL this happy chatter about Kerry is, of course, the height of wishfulness. And the last team who are going to get spooked by kids from the Kingdom is Jim Gavin’s Dublin. There’s more chance of Kildare stopping the champions in their tracks and breaking them down in the few remaining weeks of this summer than Kerry. Crazy as that sounds. Kildare, of course, are not going to get to an All-Ireland semi-final or final and actually do this piece of spectacular business. They’ll mess up long before then.
The heroics we saw from them last Saturday evening in Newbridge – and the manner in which they held their nerve through the final 10 minutes – was both inspiring and heartening.
Though it was not all that surprising.
It was predicted on this page the morning of the game. Mayo’s demise was always likely to come against a big, strong, athletic team with its back firmly against a wall. Place that wall in Newbridge on the emotional evening that was in it, and the last great effort of this magnificent Mayo team was quite likely to get swallowed up. And so it happened. Mayo, the one team Dublin have genuinely respected (and feared just enough to ward off any creeping sense of immortality) are gone. Aidan O’Shea will be the far side of 30 when he next gets a good glimpse of winning an All-Ireland title.
Younger and hungrier men are now on the hunt for Dublin’s AllIreland crown, which brings us right back to Kerry.
THEY will be lucky to get a good shot at Dublin before the end of this summer. They’ll be lucky to make it to an All-Ireland semifinal. Getting out of their group in the Super 8s is going to be a big ask.
Especially if that group comprises Galway, Kildare and Monaghan. It will take not just an enormous effort from Eamonn Fitzmaurice’s largely inexperienced team – a level of consistency will be required against two opponents who are longer on the road, and have a pile of genuine self-belief in the bank.
Even Kildare’s ambition will now be perked up.
Kerry, in comparison, are an unknown quantity. Fitzmaurice has been brave, perhaps reckless to a degree, in unleashing a team which is so small and so young.
Against Cork in the Munster final he was handsomely repaid, but Cork nearly always fall over themselves to be extra generous to Kerry when it is least expected. In their own impressively rebuilt Páirc Uí Chaoimh they were perfect hosts.
They were generous, dumb and gutless.
So quite why, on the evidence of one embarrassingly one-sided game, the vast majority of commentators and analysts are joyously rubbing their hands together at the prospect of Dublin and Kerry getting right back to their best gladiatorial days, baffles me.
We know nothing about Kerry. And they know not a whole lot more than us about themselves.
But they’ll find Kildare a serious handful (if Cian O’Neill can convince his men that being out of a doghouse is not the same as being out of jail), and Galway have three years of hard graft with which to bludgeon Kerry enthusiasm, Monaghan have five.
This looks like being the serious side of the Super 8s.
Like the World Cup run-in, the Super 8s is loaded down on the left side. The right will probably have Dublin with only Donegal to properly concern them.
They’ll find both Cork and Roscommon a light feed. They’ll find Tyrone and Armagh equally light on the tummy.
Put the four teams through and make this half of the Super 8s a six team group, and Dublin would still make tidy work of it.
The truth is that Gavin would probably quite like to see Kerry grow and further mature in the next few weeks.
He understands, no doubt, that if Fitzmaurice and Co actually defeat Galway, baffle Kildare with simple science, and slog it out with Malachy O’Rourke’s hardended looking Monaghan and win, that they will be twice as good at the end of this season than they were at the beginning.
That’s the chance that outstanding teams like Dublin are usually happy to take.
To be sure of completing that historic four in-a-row it will help if the reigning champions are staring at opponents in the semi-final and final who, at least, look the full and dangerous package.
Galway in a semi-final, and then Kerry fiercely cock o’ the walk in the All-Ireland final might privately be of Gavin’s choosing.
Dublin’s scariest enemy right now is their own righteous sense of themselves.
They thorougly deserve to be so, and with Mayo now amongst the disappeared they have no reason to be even thinking of tipping their hat to anybody else. But Kerry would do nicely. A Kerry team, emerging fast and loud this summer, and then again next year, might just be exactly what is required if Dublin are to get to step four and then mount step five on their way to becoming the greatest football team there has ever been.