Fitzmaurice hoping Kerry’s greater hunger sees them through

EAMONN Fitzmaurice is asked what he knows of his Dublin counterpart, Jim Gavin, and if he has picked up any tricks or traits from the Dublin manager that might be useful to Kerry’s cause next Sunday.

“I know as much as ye know,” Fitzmaurice tells the assembled press corp. “Looking in from the outside he’s brilliant at his job, simple as that. He’s very good. He seems to be an excellent coach. They’re winning all round them. He’s unflappable at games. He seems to be a modest guy, he keeps his head down, does his job and that’s it. There’s a lot more to him than meets the eye I’d say.”

It’s a forthright and magnanimous response from Fitzmaurice, who in many respects could be describing himself in the above lines. Having presided as manager in 20 Championship matches, Fitzmaurice’s record stands at Won 16, Drawn 2, Lost 2, including four consecutive Munster titles in his four years as charge, and the All-Ireland title in 2014 that secures his legacy. The tactical nous shown in the win over Donegal two years ago underlined his credentials as an excellent coach. Unflappable? Pretty much. Aside from the very occasional show of animation on the sideline, Fitzmaurice is as implacable as Gavin on the sideline. Keeping his head down? His pronouncements on the treatment of Kieran Donaghy in this year’s National League Final were about as saucy as Fitzmaurice has gotten in his four seasons as manager; a major exception to the unfailingly polite but vanilla utterances he gives to the public via the media.

“A lot more to him than meets the eye” could equally apply to the Kerry manager as to Jim Gavin, but Fitzmaurice – as you’d expect – won’t be giving anything away about what plans he has for Kerry and what he has in store for Dublin.

What Fitzmaurice does know is that his team – beaten by Dublin the last three times they have played – need to find improvement in their performances thus far this summer. He also knows the All-Ireland champions are not invincible, and he knows that hunger - or lack of it - can be the Achilles heel of defending champions.

“I think we need to play to our potential. I don’t think we need something dramatic from left field. We’ll have to play better than we have the last couple of times. I’d use last year’s All-Ireland final as more of a yardstick than the League final [last April]. On that day we were flat and we didn’t perform and we rode our luck a bit, but we were still there at the end and with a small rub of the green maybe could have pulled a draw out of it. But I think we’d used up our luck in the Munster Final [against Cork] where we were lucky to get a draw out of it. We need to be better. Dublin are an outstanding team and if you’re going to beat them you need to be at your best.

“I think they are beatable but you have to be at your best. This thing has been put out there that they are vulnerable in their full back line but I haven’t seen too much evidence of it yet. Their bench is always a factor and they’re good at using their bench and they’ve good subs coming on, but so have we. I just think they’ve been better than us both days and they’ve been ahead on the scoreboard which is what counts,” is how Fitzmaurice assesses the last couple of meetings between this historic rivals.

Throughout the Championship to this point Fitzmaurice has maintained the ‘one game at a time’ mantra but now he can say that the year has always been about next Sunday.

“It’s always been on the horizon for us but you do have to be very careful, and we did treat all of the other games with the utmost of care. We were professional in the three games we’ve played previously, but obviously there was that carrot on the horizon. Our first aim when we get to the Championship is always to win a Munster Championship, which we did, and we knew then at that stage that if we kept winning – the likelihood was that Dublin would keep winning – we’d be playing them in an All-Ireland semi-final. It’s the game we wanted, we’ve been waiting for since last September, we have it now.

“I think we have evolved a good bit this year as a group. All of us, myself included. We have the test now, the ultimate test really, and we’ll see if that evolution has gone far enough. But I would be happy with the way the group has evolved this year,” he says.

On the importance to Dublin of Stephen Cluxton and the weapon of the Dublin kickout, Fitzmaurice says: “It’s a conundrum. We tried to push up on it in the League final and we’d very little joy in it. He’s got better and I think Dublin have got better at it. We’ve pushed up in the past and got good success from it, but coming back to the point about them evolving, they have evolved, and I think they are even better at it than they used to be, three, four years ago. So it’s a conundrum.”

On Dublin’s bid to win back to back All-Ireland titles – something only Kerry has achieved in the last 25 years – Fitzmaurice hopes his team has that necessary ingredient to derail Dublin in their bid to retain the title.

“I think they are mad to do it because the success they’ve had in this decade that would be the ultimate achievement to get a back to back All-Ireland. I just think hunger is a factor. I think hunger caught us at the end of last year. I think on the day Dublin were hungrier than us. We had been hungry up to that point but for some reason we met a team that was hungrier than us last September. It’s very hard to measure than or quantify it or to make fellas hungry but they were hungrier than us last September. So you’d be hoping that we’d be hungrier this time around.”