Kerry will answer questions posed by Galway

Paul Brennan sees an emerging Galway team posing tough questions for a gamerusty Kerry, but the Munster champions will come up with the right answers

SOMETIMES in sport, as in life, it can be a case of ‘be careful of what you wish for’. Going into last weekend’s All-Ireland Qualifiers the general consensus was that Mayo would account for Cork somewhat more easily that they did and that Donegal, a battle-hardened if transitional team, would edge past a coming-but-not-there-yet Galway team still smarting from a humbling Connacht final defeat. Little did we know.

The thinking in Kerry was that it would be better to draw Donegal for the quarter-finals than Mayo. The logic was that Mayo could be the team better equipped and capable of turning over a Kerry team that has been kicking its heels since before the Munster final, four weeks back from next Sunday. Donegal - tough, sticky, talented but with limitations and a good degree of predictability would be a better fit for Kerry next weekend. Few of us were really factoring Galway (or Cork) into the mix. We’d be pretty certain that the Kerry management wouldn’t have counted any chickens ahead of last Saturday with regard to quarter-final opponents, save for the video analysis team having material on all three potential opponents gathered and ready for a final edit.

With the delayed Galway Donegal match getting underway in Sligo just as Mayo had finally ended Cork’s miserable season after a titanic extra-time struggle, it’s possible that Eamonn Fitzmaurice would have already been pondering a quarter-final clash with Mayo. Maybe even allowed himself a private thought that the extra-time would have put a little extra lead in Mayo legs ahead of Croke Park next Sunday.

By the time Fitzmaurice got back to his car outside the Gaelic Grounds, about 20 minutes of the final whistle, he’d have been drawing up different plans in his head after hearing that Galway were doing a number on Donegal from which they weren’t going to recover from. And now, all of a sudden, Kerry folk are gulping a little harder at the prospect of facing this Galway team next Sunday rather than that Donegal team or the other crowd, Mayo.

Do I still think Mayo were the team to avoid as far as Kerry are concerned? Yes. They weren’t great against Cork for spells, as they weren’t against Clare and Derry in the earlier Qualifiers, but of the three teams Kerry could have drawn, Mayo are the best ‘Croke Park team’ and the only one of the three that can be regarded as genuine All-Ireland winners. That’s a team you want avoid in an All-Ireland quarter-final coming in cold after a four-week lay-off.

What about Galway, then? Like the girl with the curl, when they are good they can be very, very good (as against Donegal) but when they are bad they can be horrid (the Connacht final). Against Mayo in the Connacht semi-final Kevin Walsh’s team were somewhere in between, but clearly nothing short of that first 25 minutes they put in against Donegal last Saturday sustained for 65-70 minutes - will be good enough to beat Kerry.

In Shane Walsh, Michael Daly, Damian Comer, Sean Armstrong, Johnny Heaney, Paul Conroy and Thomas Flynn, Galway have a set of forwards / attacking players that can cause any defence plenty of problems, and in Fintan Ó Curraoin and either Flynn or Conroy they have a midfield that, if it gets the best out of itself, should be capable of getting parity with whatever midfield partnership Kerry go with.

Needless to say Galway are going to have to get the balance right between having a robust, score limiting defending and committing enough to their attack to yield about the 1-14 or 1-15 they are

going to need to win this match.

We suggest this because a Kerry full forward line of O’Donoghue, Paul Geaney and Kieran Donaghy / Stephen O’Brien is more than capable of engineering a dozen points between them, especially against a Galway full back line with obvious deficiencies. Add in another six or so scores that should be expected from the eight players behind them and you can see that in al likelihood Galway aren’t going to win this with anything less than 17 points.

It’s unclear just what Galway will have taken from the Donegal win, which was over as a contest by half time, other than a much needed shot of confidence after the shelling they took from Roscommon in the Connacht final.

Interestingly, if there is one lesson Galway can absorb from that game it’s how Roscommon’s appetite for hard work played a huge part in that unexpected win. Passion and pride and hunger and endeavour alone won’t win too many All-Ireland quarter-finals but Roscommon fought on their backs that day in Salthill and Galway will have to do likewise in Croke Park. Confidence in their own ability and the talent they possess should close the gap on the last All-Ireland quarter-final they played against Kerry, but Kevin Walsh - a street-fighter with Galway in his own playing days - must ensure his players squeeze every ounce of sweat out of themselves for 80-odd minutes. Quite clearly this team weren’t prepared to put in the hard shift against a Tipperary team that was at the same stage last year and they paid the price with defeat. That old failing came back to haunt them against Roscommon a couple of weeks ago, and now Galway must put in back-to-back performances to give themselves any chance against Kerry.

It goes without saying that all number of ‘uncontrollables’ can come into play - the weather, injury, refereeing calls, luck - that could tilt this game such that the result goes against the received wisdom.

Surmising how Kerry might start on Sunday is a shooting in the dark exercise, except to say that the management don’t do wholesale changes from one Championship game to the next. Kieran Donaghy is tailor made to start at full forward on Declan Kyne and look to expose frailties in the Galway full back line, while there might also be cause to start Stephen O’Brien in the half forward line to add a bit more scoring threat to a line that can be overly consumed with defensive work.

At midfield Jack Barry could come in to add some pace to cope with what is a very mobile Galway midfield, and further back Killian Young is certain to be pushing hard for inclusion in a defence that will need to be one its collective toes against a Galway attack that rediscovered it mojo against Donegal.

In this the last year of the All-Ireland quarter-finals as we know them - before the Super 8 comes in - it’s a fourth meeting of Kerry and Galway at this stage of the All-Ireland series.

In 2002 Kerry dethroned the then All-Ireland champions by eight points.

Six years later in that famous floodlit deluge, Kerry had five points to spare over The Tribesmen.

And six years on again, in 2014, prevailed by seven points.

That’s five, seven and eightpoint wins for Kerry in the counties’ previous three Croke Park meetings. Would it be too much of a stretch to suggest the sequence will be completed by a six-point Kerry win next Sunday? We don’t think we’ll be too far out in that prediction.

All of a sudden, Kerry folk are gulping a little harder at the prospect of facing this Galway team rather than that Donegal team or the other crowd, Mayo