‘You always wanted to play Kerry’

Kerry have always held a special place in David Tubridy’s imagination and football ambitions, writes Joe Ó Muircheartaigh

THIS is where David Tubridy always wanted to be – in the Clare full-forward line pitting his football wits and silken skills against the very best. And, in west Clare they’ve never come better than Kerry, with this heartland of the Clare football tradition never hiding its admiration for the purveyors of the sweet science of ‘catch and kick’ on the southern bank of the Shannon Estuary.

David’s father Tommy would have had plenty of jousts with the men from the southern bank, whether it was club or county, over the course of his stellar career from the 1970s through to the early 90s.

Since 2008 it’s been David’s turn, with his eagerness to take on the Kingdom and see where it might take Clare being whetted in the mid-2000s when he saw the green and gold plunder All-Ireland titles in 2004, ’06 and ’07.

“When you’re growing up you always want to play against Kerry,” he admits.

“You’d always be watching them on television and you’d see the likes of Marc Ó Sé marking the best players for Dublin, Tyrone and all the big teams.

“2008 was my first year with Clare and we played Kerry in the semi-final in Killarney. I was on Marc Ó Sé that day, so my first introduction to Kerry was a tough one. To be thrown into that in my first year was a great learning experience,” he adds.

Ten championship seasons on and the learning curve goes on for Tubridy and Clare as they roll up to face Kerry once more, a fourth championship outing against them since 2014 and Tubridy’s sixth in all.

And for Tubridy et al it’s about atonement.

“I think a lot of us felt that we left ourselves down last year in the Munster semi-final and All-Ireland quarter-final games against them,” he says.

“I don’t think we played up to what we could have played and that’s something we need to set straight the next day.

“We were trying to get off to a good solid start against them [last year] and stay with them as long as we could, but in Killarney the two goals at the start put a damper on things.

“We kept tipping away alright, but it’s very hard to come back from any team if you give them a six or seven point lead. Kerry played out the game well after that and we just couldn’t make inroads into them.

“I thought that we were playing very well in Croke Park for the first 20 minutes – the backs were doing well and containing the Kerry forwards, it’s just that it was one of these weird things that happens when it hit of Dean Ryan’s boot straight into the path of Donnchadh Walsh going straight through and it had one of the easiest goals he’d ever score.

“It’s those bounces of the ball that you’d hope to get on your side, it’s just that last year Kerry got those chances and they didn’t waste any time in taking them,” he adds.

A year on the 30-year-old full-forward reckons it’s an “ideal time to get Kerry again”.

It’s the Kingdom’s first outing since the National League final and they’ll be overwhelming favourites, while Clare were underwhelming for vast tracts of their second half against Limerick in the quarter-final when they struggled to get over the line by a point.

“The 2014 game was similar enough to this year,” he recalls.

“I was talking to some of the lads coming back in the car after the game and reminding them that the last time we played Kerry in Cusack Park we weren’t given much of a chance.

“We had drawn with Waterford in the Park and were lucky to draw with them and then went down to Fraher Field and beat them. Going in against Kerry we weren’t given a chance of getting close to them but there were only four points in it.

“Now it’s the same after the last day against Limerick – people were saying that Clare should be beating Limerick by six or seven points before going into to play Kerry. For us the big thing was to get over the line, hopefully struggling to get over the line will stand to us in that we learn from our mistakes.

“We had a comfortable four or five point gap all the time. Any time they got a point we always replied back. I think that we probably just stood off them after that. The goal was a killer blow and a tough one to take and they had great chance a few seconds later to level it and we got a lucky free after that. “But I think in the end we did well to close out the game. There were only two or three minutes left and we held the ball well and finished out the game. Down through the years we mightn’t have been able to do that and would have panicked, gave away the ball and conceded a soft free or a handy point,” he adds. It’s that maturity in the Clare performance, something that has been building incrementally over the last number of years, that has them primed for a performance more aligned to the 2014 meeting that finished 1-17 to 1-13 than 2016 when there were nine and eleven points between them in Killarney and Croke Park respectively. “The middle third is going to be key. We have to set up a line that’s going to be very strong and that we don’t let Kerry through too easily. They have a lot of great players, great runners on the ball and you saw that in the league final when they had runners coming from all over the place. We can’t give them the space to do that and have to put the pressure on and stop them building. “If we get goal chances we have to take them. After Eoin Cleary’s goal the last day we missed two or three more chances after that. Against Kerry you can’t do that. Our scoring ratio was way down against Limerick and we just have to be more clinical in front of goal.” Here’s hoping.