Ready to make their own history
As a county Kerry is bidding for a fifth successive All-Ireland Minor title but Paul Brennan writes that this 2018 team is looking to make their own history
FOR the fifth year running Kerry will have a dog in the fight on All-Ireland Football Finals day in Croke Park, and again it will be the young pups rather than the old dogs that will represent the Kingdom as the county bids for an unprecedented fifth All-Ireland Minor football title in as many years. It cannot be overstated that while this is a five-in-a-row bid there is a nuanced but important difference between what the Kerry minors and, say, the Dublin seniors will be trying to achieve the same afternoon when they aim for a fourth consecutive title.
For one, there are several Dublin players looking to win a fourth medal in four years, with some bidding to pick up a fifth and even a sixth All-Ireland title. Secondly, the same manager, Jim Gavin, will be in charge for all four Championship campaigns for what will be a four-in-a-row in the truest sense possible.
At minor level it’s different, for obvious reasons. The age limit ceiling means that it’s highly unlikely that any player will play in more than three All-Ireland minor titles, and even to play in back to back Championships is the mark of a very talented footballers.
In fact that only one man, Brendan Reidy from Austin Stacks, has won three All-Ireland minor medals, as Kerry’s goalkeeper in the 1931, 1932 and 1933 Championships, while Brian McDonald from Laois played in three finals at the end of the last century, winning the first two but losing the third.
It’s also the case, of course, that Kerry’s last four All-Ireland minor winning teams have been split between two managers, Jack O’Connor and Peter Keane, with the latter looking to manage his third All-Ireland winning team.
Furthermore, the drop in age eligibility this year from under 18 to under 17 years of age means that there is no carry over of players from last year’s winning team to this year’s: this is in every sense an entirely new Kerry team heading to Croke Park to face Galway on Sunday, the only exception being the management team of Keane, Tommy Griffin, James Foley, Chris Flannery and Padraig Murphy.
With that in mind there really shouldn’t be any additional weight of expectation on this team going into Sunday’s final, and there is enough evidence from this summer to suggest this Kerry team will have it all to do to win its first All-Ireland title. Their semi-final win over Monaghan was certainly character building and more useful, one imagines, than had they cantered to victory, but it also highlighted the usual frailties that can bedevil young teams on big occasions, and Keane and his management will be working on the mental strength of the team as much as their football in the intervening time.
Having been quite comfortable and in control for three-quarters of that All-Ireland semi-final, Kerry lose concentration to allow Monaghan poach a goal, and then allowed their heads to scramble sufficiently for the Ulster boys to score a second goal and actually take a brief lead before Kerry recovered to in ‘additional time’ to dig out a narrow win.
Substitute Jack Kennelly scored one of those points in added times, with Paul Walsh converting two clutch frees, but an obvious feature of this year’s team compared to 12 months ago is that there is no overriding star in the team the way David Clifford was last year. Walsh, Dylan Geaney and team captain Paul O’Shea are quality players among several others, but in the absence of a talent like Clifford the management has assembled another very balanced team that will be again hoping to produce a team performance greater than the sum of its constituent parts.
As one would expect at this point in the Championship Kerry have a very settled starting team, with the likelihood that the fifteen that started against Monaghan will take to the field to face Galway. Ruaidhrí Ó Beaglaoich could, perhaps, force his way back into the attack, but it’s more likely that he will be brought into the action when the game is there to be won in the final quarter.
There is also the not so small matter of the opposition for Galway to consider, and the Galway champions have been cutting a swathe through this Championship. The game through the round-robin Connacht Championship unbeaten in five game, scoring 13 goals and 78 points to win by an average of 11.6 points, including a four-point, 2-13 to 2-9 win over Roscommon in the Connacht Final.
It would be foolhardy and largely irrelevant to try to extract anything from Galway’s and Kerry’s All-Ireland quarter-final wins other than to baldly state that Galway had those four points to spare over Roscommon before Kerry beat the Rossies by nine in the quarter-finals, while Kerry easily accounted for Clare in the Munster Final with 20 points to spare, while the Banner county ran Galway to seven points in their All-Ireland quarter-final meeting in Tullamore.
It’s in their respective semi-finals that each team might find glean best information as to how to get their better of the opposition, with Galway coming through a high-scoring and open 3-13 to 2-9 win over Meath, while Kerry had just those two points to spare over Monaghan.
Keane and his selectors will have their forensic homework done on Galway and will surely devise a couple of specific matchups, but Kerry have generally adhered to a fairly rigid positional structure and Sunday’s won’t stray too far from that.
Team captain Paul O’Shea, though he will wear no.11, will partner Darragh Lyne at midfield, Darragh Rahilly will switch into the half forward line and the Paul Walsh will look to wreak more havoc from one the corner of the attack.
Defensively Keane and co. have fashioned another excellent unit that for the most part are structured, disciplined, tackle well and work hard. Throw in a penchant to attack from deep at the right times and this is a very good Kerry team, even if it’s not considered as being right up there with a couple of its predecessors in this five-year run.
It will take a really good team to beat them, but on the evidence before us Galway tick an awful lot of boxes. They have some big, powerful players; they are a goal scoring machine; and perhaps most importantly at this level, they are a team high on confidence. A bright start for the Tribesmen could spell a long and troubling afternoon for Kerry.
It’s a fraught and ultimately facile exercise to call a winner with any certainty: these are, after all, 16 and 17-year kids playing the biggest football match of their young lives and it’s a credit to them just to be able to perform on this stage on this day of days.
The hope here is that Kerry do more things better than Galway and make it an unprecedented fifth consecutive All-Ireland title for the Kingdom and take the county further ahead on the roll of honour with sixteen titles, but Galway will be just as determined to claim a seventh title for their county and a first since 2007. The counties have recent history with Kerry beating the Tribesmen in the All-Ireland Final two years ago, but Sunday is all about the here and now. Talk of a five-in-a-row, while understandable, is also largely misplaced: by Sunday evening all this bunch of Kerry minors want is one in a row.
They are capable of it...but so too is Galway.