Kerry must beware the TIDES OF MARCH

Having already swept all before them, Jim Gavin’s Dublin tsunami is on the verge of washing away the Kingdom’s greatest achievements

THE wonder next Saturday night is not that Dublin will seek to equal a record that has been locked in the GAA vault for 84 years, but that we ever got to hear about it in the first instance.

The irony is that a sporting association which was founded to promote and protect Irish culture and heritage never deemed a public archive of its history a priority.

Apart from a visit to the Croke Park Museum, the closest the public is likely to experience an interface moment with the GAA’s archive is standing at the urinal in an ale house toilet where a framed 1970s Carroll’s All-Star poster survives in a room of unimaginable horrors.

We truly do the Wall of Fame like no other.

Anyhow, Woodward and Bernstein are in journalism’s ha’penny place compared to our colleagues in this industry who trawled dusty leaf after dusty leaf to unearth the stat that Kerry hold the all-time unbeaten record in Gaelic football – which has stood at 34 games – since 1933.

Well for another six days anyway, when, in the sweetest of symmetrical moments, Dublin come calling to Tralee to take half ownership. Should they achieve it, within a week, a home game against Roscommon will see them out on their glorious own.

Naturally, in the sterile world we live in, talk of that record will be dismissed by both camps this week when, if they speak at all, they will advise us that this is just another game, it’s about the two points. Yeah, sure it is. This matters. It matters to Dublin, because if it didn’t they would not have scrapped their way out of a hole against Tyrone or hung on grimly against Donegal at the death or blitzed Mayo last weekend with a performance so perfectly nuanced in intensity and fluency that it ranks with anything that they have ever produced.

It matters to Jim Gavin, because a manager who has made an art form out of talking microphones into snooze-mode has suddenly found an edge, sniping at Tyrone’s massed defence and implying after the Donegal game that the referees’ union is conspiring against him. If he keeps this up, he is in danger of becoming interesting.

But it matters even more to Kerry. Éamonn Fitzmaurice was already on message after last weekend’s win over Roscommon, insisting that records only matter when you look back afterwards.

That is not how it works, especially not in Kerry and especially when it is Dublin who are blowing down historical door after historical door.

Dublin have beaten the Kingdom four times on the bounce in the Championship – three of them under Fitzmaurice – which constitutes new ground and is not including last year’s League final trimming.

This is cutting right into the soul of Kerry football for all kinds of reasons, mainly because it is threatening the legacy of their storied past but it also reaffirms that the future has never been so uncertain because while that blue tidal wave washing over them will eventually subside, it will certainly return.

And if Dublin emerge unscathed from Austin Stack Park on Saturday night it is not the fact that the champions will have equalled an old Kerry record that will nag but something far more uncomfortable. The assumption that it is Kerry who houses the game’s greatest ever team – the one that under Mick O’Dwyer won eight All-Irelands in 12 years – has been off limits for debate.

But should Dublin win another League and Championship this year (which would represent a fourth double in five years, a fifth consecutive League title and a fifth Sam Maguire in seven years, with a first three-in-a-row in 31 years thrown in for good measure) then it would surely be time for us to have that conversation.

The accountants may still argue that it would leave Dublin coming up shy in terms of All-Irelands but Gavin’s team is dominating in far more competitive times than when O’Dwyer ruled the roost.

Back then a season-split National League made football’s secondary competition a closer blood relation to a boozy St Stephen’s Day kickabout than what exists today. Dublin’s consistency in the League – they have lost just five of the 40 top flight games they have played under Gavin – is worth a couple of All-Irelands on its own.

And in winning their Championships they have arguably been tested in a way that O’Dwyer’s team never were – three of their final wins have come in one-point games, while their 2015 triumph over Kerry was also in a one-score final.

That reveals a team that can blind with brilliance but equally possess a nerve to match their nonchalance.

They are like no team that football has witnessed since Kerry’s golden era.

And if they are not stopped soon, they will be a team like no other at all.

Dublin’s consistency in the League is worth a couple of All-Irelands