The Kerryman (South Kerry Edition)
Momentum must carry into Dublin game
As promising as the win against Roscommon was, Kerry must at least shake up a Dublin team on the cusp of surpassing Kerry’s record 43-game unbeaten run, writes Paul Brennan
WHEN the National League fixtures were released last September a cursory glance at Kerry’s first four matches suggested a yield of at least four points, and that’s how it has played out. The thing is, few would have expected the two wins to have come on the road while the defeats would have been on home turf, notwithstanding the opposition involved.
On paper at least, Mayo and Monaghan would have looked the tougher tests, but a first round trip to Donegal never looked particularly inviting, and given Roscommon’s bright start to last year’s campaign, a fourth round game in a revamped Hyde Park was no guarantee of points either. And yet Letterkenny and Roscommon town is where Kerry found the will and the way to victory, while the familiar surrounds of Austin Stack Park and Fitzgerald Stadium proved unkind to them. Or perhaps the Kerry team was unkind to their home grounds.
Either way Kerry’s next game is the visit of Dublin - now unbeaten in 33 League and Championship matches - to Tralee on March 18 for a highly anticipated contest under Stack Park’s floodlights. Kerry will have taken several positives from their weekend’s work against Roscommon, but Dublin’s trimming of Mayo in Croke the previous evening in Croke Park was and is a salutary message to the country that this Dublin team remains every bit as formidable as they have been for the last two years.
As we’ve stated here several times before, League results and performances don’t really count for much with respect to Kerry for whom the Championship really is the only thing that matters. One gets the same sense from Dublin, except that they just keep on winning League matches anyway, almost in spite of themselves.
Kerry have been shorn of a number of players since the start of this League campaign and they have been actively threading some new players into the fabric of the team. Along the way they’ve won some and lost some.
Dublin have been at the same thing - leaving some established players in the wings while Jim Gavin hands a number of younger players their opportunity in the team - but thus far they’ve remained unbeaten. Bloodied, yes, by Tyrone and Donegal, but still unbowed. They come to Tralee in 10 days looking to equal Kerry’s record of 34 games unbeaten across League and Championship, which was set in the early 1930s.
Interestingly, Kerry were the last team to beat Dublin in a National League or Championship match - a 0-15 to 1-10 victory on March
1, 2015 - and it’s more than appropriate that the county that has the chance to deny Dublin a record equalling 34-match unbeaten streak is the title holder, Kerry.
Of course, the Kerry players and management (and we can assume their Dublin counterparts) will insist that the record won’t come into their preparations or thinking or approach to next Saturday week’s game and they’ll be right. What will be very much in their heads will be simply to win the game (and in Dublin’s case the added and understandable incentive not to lose the game).
Consider that Dublin midfielder Brian Fenton, since making his senior inter-county debut in 2015, has played 28 League and Championship matches and not tasted defeat in a single one (won 24 and drawn 4) and it gives an idea of Dublin’s invincibility in the last 24 or so months. That’s the task that Kerry face the weekend after next, but whatever about records or winning streaks - or even that it’s just the League - Kerry absolutely must at the very least put in a performance against Dublin to suggest they can beat them if and when they meet later in the summer.
Someone suggested last Saturday night that Dublin didn’t go out to beat Mayo; they went out to bury them. After their heroic victory in Tralee and an impressive showing against Roscommon the following week, Mayo would have gone to Croke Park in confident enough mood last weekend. Imagine the doubt sown in Stephen Rochford’s and his players’ heads this week.
If Dublin come away from Stack Park with a six or seven-point win on March 18 what exactly would it say about Kerry’s best laid plans? Notwithstanding that Colm Cooper, Johnny Buckley, Kieran Donaghy and some U-21s have to return to the squad, another loss to Dublin would surely have near fatal consequences for the Kingdom’s Championship plans.
Last year’s two League defeats to Dublin merely laid the platform for a three-in-a-row sweep for the Dubs against Kerry in 2016. Defeat for Kerry on March 18 would be their fifth in a row to a team managed by Jim Gavin.
The question for the Kerry management is whether to stick or twist - i.e. do they continue with the new boys like Jack Barry, Jack Savage, Ronan Shanahan and Kevin McCarthy and risk some or all getting scalded by more experienced Dublin opponents, or do Kerry revert to more seasoned heads like Anthony Maher, Darran O’Sullivan, Mark Griffin, Stephen O’Brien and Bryan Sheehan to go toe to toe with Dublin from the start?
The danger with the first scenario is that the game could be gone from Kerry before they even realise it, and the second scenario means Kerry’s bench would be extremely young and inexperienced and not the situation you’d want if Kerry needed reinforcements at the business end of the game.
The informed thinking would be to stick with the project of getting the younger players into the team early and often. Jack Barry hadn’t the greatest 30 minutes against Roscommon so he, for example, needs to get back on the field and get motoring again.
If Eamonn Fitzmaurice is going to turn to these players to win an All-Ireland in August and September then they need to know the scale of the challenge that lies ahead before they encounter it.
Mayo and Monaghan, thus far, have given Barry, Savage, Shanahan et al a taste of exactly what senior football is all about. Dublin will be another step up.
Kerry won’t win the All-Ireland Championship on March 18 but, in some respects, starting the wrong team or putting down the wrong message could be the losing of it.
It’s as close to Championship as this Kerry team will ever get in March.
The question for the Kerry management is whether to stick or twist against Dublin