Paul Murphy sets high standards for himself and when he makes a mistake takes it to heart in a big way, writes

Damian Stack

OU know the feeling. That sickening, sinking feeling. You play it over and over again in your mind. Why did

I do that? Why did I do it like that? Could I have done it any differently?

For most of us the cause of the anguish is relatively trivial or at least private and this was anything but private. It was done in full glare of the biggest crowd to grace Austin Stack Park in god knows how long – not to mention the TV cameras and audience watching on at home.

Players make mistakes all the time – to err is human – the problem was the time in the match the mistake was made and the circumstances of it. Kerry held a slender, but well-deserved lead with mere seconds remaining on the clock.

With Dublin hunting for an equaliser, Peter Crowley earned a free out. Relief all round. The deal looked sealed. Paul Murphy, ever dependable, stepped up to take it. What was he thinking? To keep possession of the ball. To play the clock down. To get the hell out of Dodge with the win and the two points.

Seconds after the ball left his boot his error was clear. Shane Carthy raced onto the ball. Paul Mannion finished the move and Dublin escaped the Kingdom with their unbeaten record in tact.

After the match, there was nobody calling for Murphy’s head. Among the Kerry fans there was more sympathy and understanding than anger. Sure they were disappointed not to have won – the urge to scratch the Dublin itch was strong – but that didn’t translate into recriminations.

A mistake is just that: a mistake. They happen and, yet, even knowing all that, for the man at the centre of it all it’s not so easy to park it and move on. Not straight-away at any rate, such are the standards that Kerry footballers hold themselves to.

What rankled most of all was how basic a mistake it was. This was bread and butter stuff to Murphy and he knows it. The execution of the pass, he felt, wasn’t what it could have been. The bigger mistake was not seeing the danger posed by Carthy.

It was truly a sickener. There’s no other way of looking at it and there was nobody more sickened by the whole thing than Murphy. It made for a “tough” couple of days for the Rathmore man.

He avoided the papers. He avoided the internet. He knew he’d be a topic of conversation and he certainly wasn’t going to seek it out. Maybe if he had he might have felt a little better. It wasn’t as big a talking point after the match as he might have imagined.

Still we can’t think it would have made a huge difference to Murphy. It all comes back to those high standards the players set for each other and, most importantly, for themselves.

He even admits he didn’t “sleep great that night” and it certainly took a few days to work it out of his system. What he needed more than anything else was to get right back up on that horse again.

That meant training. That meant matches. Luckily he didn’t have to wait long for either. Kerry were back in training on Monday or Tuesday night and that was the first step towards really putting it behind him.

The second and most important step was to play a game of football. That following weekend Kerry travelled to Cavan and, while they didn’t win, it provided Murphy with exactly what he needed.

“We went up to Cavan the next weekend then and we were disappointed with the performance, but personally in a way I was happy enough coming down the road because my kicking was good,” he says.

“I think I scored a point and all my kick-passes found their man and that was the target I’d set and if there was another free kick I wouldn’t shy away from it. I’d take it on again. I was down for a couple of days, but I’ve a good circle around me to tell me to ‘cop on it’s only a game at the end of the day’.

“I was lucky I’d a game the next weekend. You need a game. You need training just to get that out of your head and move on.”

Just a few weeks later – following a few late twists and turns – Kerry again faced off against Dublin, this time in the league final. It’d be easy to paint this as an opportunity for vindication for Murphy, the chance to right a few wrongs and to well and truly bury the memories of what happened in Austin Stack Park.

That, however, would be precisely the wrong way of looking at it.

“You’re looking at it then as a personal kind of thing,” Murphy explains.

“Us beating Dublin as a team is more important than me beating Dublin to make up for that kick. There’s been a lot more that’s gone on between ourselves and Dublin the last couple of years than just that league game in Tralee.”

Kerry celebrated lustily when the final whistle blew on that one. The players seemed genuinely delighted to have won a National League title, which is not necessarily the norm in this neck of the woods.

There’s that line from the late great Strand Road man John Dowling, which our colleague Weeshie Fogarty is fond of and sums up the Kerry attitude to the GAA’s second competition quite nicely: leagues are for playing in and championships for winning.

“I don’t think our celebrations were that wild to be honest,” Murphy says when asked about it and in that he’s right.

For maybe thirty seconds directly after the final whistle, however, the players, especially the younger ones, let go just a little bit before later catching themselves again.

“You don’t need me to tell you that we’ve suffered at Dublin’s hands so it was a relief really,” the All Star defender continues.

“We were fully convinced that we were going to beat them. Any time we played them we’ve believed we’ve been capable of beating them and I think we have been capable of beating them on those occasions. We just haven’t finished them off and that’s a tribute to Dublin really.”

It says a lot about the state of play at the moment how large Dublin loom in the Kingdom’s collective consciousness. That’s the rivalry which matters. That’s the rivalry worth the name.

As Dublin have forged ahead and Kerry have striven to keep up and overhaul them, Cork have fallen back and so, as a