Fitz might not be paranoid but that doesn’t mean they’re not out to get Kerry

IT’S widely accepted that if All-Ireland champions Dublin are to be dethroned this year, and if Kerry is the team to do it, then Eamonn Fitzmaurice is going to have to come up with something pretty special to finally get a Championship win over the county that is quickly becoming to Kerry this decade what Tyrone were to them in the last.

Dublin now fill the GAA narrative so much - both here in Kerry and nationally - that a good portion of Monday’s press conference with Fitzmaurice was dedicated to Dublin, even if the Kerry manager was typically diplomatic in steering the conversation back to this Sunday’s game against Clare.

Quite what Fitzmaurice has in mind should the counties meet in an All-Ireland semi-final is anyone’s guess right now, but the Finuge man has already pulled his first rabbit from the hat, so to speak, before Kerry have even kicked a Championship football in anger.

Last Friday the Kerry squad and management returned from their now annual five-day training camp abroad, but some of you might be surprised to hear that it wasn’t Portugal where they went. Rather, the squad found themselves in the south of England, at the home of Harlequins Rugby Football Club in Surrey, where they put in place their Championship plans.

It wasn’t until late Tuesday that word began to emerge that the Kerry panel hadn’t, in fact, revisited to the Amendoeira Golf Resort, but were in the UK where, incidentally, the weather was wetter and colder than it was in both the Algarve and Kerry.

The need for a change of scenery is totally understandable. A return to Amendoeira would have been a fifth or sixth time for some of the Kerry players. The secrecy surrounding the actual destination was a little less clear until, that is, Fitzmaurice offered a simple explanation.

“I kept it tight because it’s a pre-Championship training camp, it was in a public facility and I just wanted it to be private. I didn’t have this big policy of secrecy around it. I changed it and I wasn’t asked were we or weren’t we going to Portugal... there’s a big Irish community in England and I didn’t want it to turn into a circus when it was a pre-Championship camp,” Fitzmaurice explained. And that’s fair enough. But one wonders was Fitzmaurice guarding against a few ex-pats wandering down from London to have a gander at Kerry training, or was there a fear of others, with a deeper agenda, scouting out Kerry?

If a man can climb a tree in Killarney to spy on a Kerry training session and almost get away with it, how much more difficult (or easy) would it be for another county to put a man on a flight to Portugal with the intention of peering through the wire to see what Kerry were up to on the training field?

We’re not suggesting that there was some ashen-faced Clare man in the Algarve last week when he realised the Kerry team hadn’t arrived into Faro as initially thought, but is the notion of, say, Cork or Tyrone or Dublin dispatching a scout to these training camps, which are often held in venues accessible to the general public, so far fetched?

It’s not improbable that Kerry worked on tactics with Cork or Dublin in mind that won’t have to be put on view against Clare this Sunday, but how useful would it be for those top counties to have a sneak preview of what the others are hatching?

No matter how Kerry’s Championship plays out this summer, Fitzmaurice’s eleventh hour manoeuvre last week won’t be a defining moment, but as the margins between success and failure at the top level of inter-county football get smaller and smaller, Kerry might just have, knowingly or inadvertently, sold their opponents their first great dummy of the summer.