Successful Under-20/21 teams offer more to the seniors than minors do

REMEMBER the hand-wringing that went on for a considerable number of years as Kerry moved further and further away from 1994 without another All-Ireland Minor Football title coming along? For close on 20 years Jack Ferriter seemed the most famous - or at least the most mentioned - Kerry minor footballer, having captained the county to All-Ireland glory in ’94. In the end the Dingle club man didn’t ‘reign’ as long Ireland’s 1948 Grand Slam captain Karl Mullen or England’s ’66 World Cup skipper Bobby Moore, and now after four unprecedented years of success Ferriter’s name has slipped well down the list of Kerry’s All-Ireland minor championship winning captains, below Liam Kearney, Mark O’Connor, Sean O’Shea and, most recently, David Clifford.

It might be exactly half the length of time that Ferriter was ‘the last man to captain...’ but Killian Young is now into his tenth year as ‘the last man to captain Kerry to the Under-21 title’ and the natives are getting restless again. In the greater scheme of things U-21 titles mightn’t seem like the most important currency to be trading in, but we’d suggest that success at this level - now, of course, changed to an Under-20 grade - is more important to senior team success than the Minor grade.

Young - despite being injured for the start of this season - remains a vital and sprightly member of the senior squad, but that 2008 All-Ireland U-21 Final win over Kildare is becoming a distant and fading memory to all but the few thousand in Semple Stadium on that Saturday in early May. Yet six of the 20 players in action that day went on to win senior All-Ireland titles with Kerry - Shane Enright, David Moran, Kieran O’Leary, Johnny Buckley, Tommy Walsh and Young - with all but Walsh (who opted for an AFL career soon after) becoming established and valued senior players to one degree or another.

Go back a decade earlier to 1998 and Kerry’s second last All-Ireland U-21 winning team, and the starting team in the All-Ireland Final gave up nine players - Mike McCarthy, Tom O’Sullivan, John Sheehan, Tomás Ó Sé, Tommy Griffin, Aodhan MacGearailt, Mike Frank Russell, Noel Kennelly and current senior manager Eamonn Fitzmaurice - who went on to win senior All-Irelands.

Interestingly, the 1994 minor team captained by Ferriter produced just four players who went on to have any meaningful career in a Kerry senior jersey - Denis O’Dwyer, Barry O’Shea, Russell and Fitzmaurice - with the vast majority of them never playing senior football for the county.

And that’s the general rule with minor teams and U-21 teams: the former actually produce very few players for senior teams, with the latter (especially the successful ones) routinely coughing up half a dozen players who go onto have more than useful senior inter-county careers.

Consider Dublin for a moment. Their 2010 All-Ireland winning U-21 team produced eight players who went on to win senior All-Ireland medals including Rory O’Carroll, James McCarthy, Jonny Cooper and Dean Rock.

Two years later the 2012 winning U-21 team had Jack McCaffrey, Ciaran Kilkenny and Paul Mannion among the seven players who’d go on to win a Celtic Cross.

In 2014 there were 10 Dubs who won the All-Ireland U-21 title who’d collect a senior medal in the following years including John Small, Brian Fenton and Cormac Costello.

And of the 21 players involved in last year’s Under-21 Final win over Galway, six are part of Jim Gavin’s senior squad this year including Con O’Callaghan, Paddy Small and goalkeeper Evan Comerford who played in last Sunday’s Leinster semi-final win over Longford.

Contrast that to the Dublin team that won the 2012 All-Ireland Minor Championship and see how many Dublin seniors have come through from that team without enjoying U-21 success on the way: practically no one. David Byrne, Eric Lowndes, Conor Mulally, Shane Carthy, Niall Scully, Conor McHugh and Cormac Costello were All-Ireland winning minors six years ago but none of them have yet established themselves as certain starters in Gavin’s senior team. All six were U-21 champions in 2014 but the point remains: senior teams pick up more players who’ve been hot-housed and successful at Under-21 level than at Minor, and there’s no reason to see that changing with the change to an Under-20 Championship.

Sean O’Shea and David Clifford are the obvious exceptions - for now - with the teenagers deemed too good and to valuable to the Kerry senior team to be left to the natural trajectory of going from minor to U-20 before getting a senior call-up.

It seems strange now - quaint almost - that Killian Young, Under-21 team captain in 2008, made his senior championship debut two years earlier in 2006, just a year after playing minor, before starting all five games in Kerry’s run to the All-Ireland senior title in 2007. But in the intervening decade no player has been fast-tracked into the Kerry senior team from the minor ranks as quick as that: until now.

Clifford was such an exceptional performer in last year’s minor championship that he could conceivably have ran out with the senior team on the same days, but Eamonn Fitzmaurice will have a much closer eye on Friday’s U-20 game in Newcastle West than he will on the Munster Minor Final on June 23 (leaving aside the practicalities).

Diarmuid O’Connor, Stefan Okunbor and David Shaw – among others – have been brilliant minors, but it’s what they do and show in this U-20 Championship that will determine their football futures.

And as history has shown, an All-Ireland U-20/21 medal will buy them more progress than a Minor title. Just as Jack Ferriter and Eamonn Fitzmaurice.