Clifford’s star power shines brightly

Everybody’s been talking about David Clifford ever since he made his minor debut. The Kerry captain spoke with Damian Stack

WELL... what’s he like? That’s the question everybody asks. The answer is the same every time – honestly, we have no idea. Your guess is as good as ours. All we know is what we see during the sixty minutes of a match.

What he’s done, what he can do, what he might be capable of in the future, has made him a star. It has made him the most talked about footballer of his age in the county and, indeed, the country.

Not yet nineteen years of age and David Clifford is already box office. It’s no exaggeration to suggest no other minor footballer has caught the public’s imagination to the same degree as he has, not since Colm Cooper and, even then, Gooch’s minor career had nothing on Clifford’s.

Now that’s no poor reflection on Cooper. It’s simply a fact that by the end of this season we’ll have seen three times as much of Clifford as a minor as we did Cooper. The young Fossa man is getting ready this week to take part in his second All Ireland football final – Cooper never saw one.

It’s been Clifford’s good fortune – and ours – that he has come of age during a golden era for the Kingdom in the grade. He’s good enough surely to carry a mediocre team a long way, but in teams bursting with talent, as Peter Keane’s minor teams have been for the last two years, his genius is given even freer rein.

Genius. It’s a big word to use about one so young. We get that. We don’t want to blow him up too much or heap too much pressure upon his shoulders. The thing is though, it’s hardly a secret at this stage. People know. It doesn’t necessarily take a genius to recognise one, which brings us back to where we started... what’s he like?

Last week we got to meet the boy wonder for the first time. As captain of his county he was presented to the press in Fitzgerald Stadium. That in itself says something. It says the management team trust him implicitly. Clifford has a good head upon his shoulders as twenty minutes in his company readily attested.

Self-possessed would be a good way of describing him. If he was daunted by the prospect of talking to a group of journalists, red lights active on their various recording devices, he certainly didn’t show it.

Granted it’s not the most natural of situations, nevertheless you do get a certain feel for what somebody is like and Clifford is easy-going, polite and confident without a whiff of arrogance. He knows he’s good. Whether or not he knows just how good he is, is another question.

Whatever about that, it’s clear that this isn’t a guy skating on natural ability. Gifted though he may be, Clifford has got to the level he has as much by dint of hard work as because of what God gave him.

“I would like to come a bit early to training and a lot of other fellas would do it too,” he says.

“That’s actually a very good testament to this team. You could land down an hour before training and there’d be six or seven fellas there before you.

I do try to put in the extra bit of work, because if I’m not doing the work, somebody else is. That’s the way I look at it, I have to stay on top.”

One thing that used to annoy him – “would kind of pee me off to be honest with you” – was when people would say he was all about his left. Needless to say nobody says that about him any more. This is a guy driven to be thebesthecanbe.

On a purely physical basis the eighteen-year-old is every bit as big a man as he looks on the pitch. That’s not always the case. A big man togged isn’t always a big man in his civvies. Tall and broad, you can see why he’s proven such a handful for full-back lines this past two years.

Sometimes, of course, size can give a distorting impression of what a young footballer might be capable of. An all-conquering minor doesn’t necessarily make an all-conquering senior.

Obviously there’s more to Clifford than just his size. There are things he can do with the ball that others – even very gifted footballers – can only dream of. The boy’s a bit special and, presumably he’s well used to people saying that about him now. That makes his seeming level-headedness all the more impressive.

“There’s enough fellas around who’ll bring you back to earth,” he says.

“I don’t think about it [the attention and adulation] too

much in fairness. There’s always another game and another game after that so there’s no point really thinking about it. It’s not going to help me. It’s not going to improve me if I do keep thinking about those things.”

The swathe he’s cut through this year’s championship has been doubly impressive than last. There’s been no difficult second album from the Fossa man. Last year he had the element of surprise. This year everybody knows about him and it’s made no difference whatsoever.

Clifford does as Clifford does. Everybody else just has to deal with it. And remember he did all this with a huge burden of expectation upon his shoulders. Everybody outside the camp expected him to be the main man this year.

“To be honest I didn’t [feel the pressure to be the main man],” he says.

“I don’t tend to think about those kind of things personally myself too much. I think more about the team and if I don’t perform somebody else will, another forward is going to get the scores or somebody out the field is going to perform, so I don’t worry about it much.

“Obviously I do think about the game a lot and I do get nervous before games and all that, but I just go out and do what I can.”

The thing about watching Clifford play is that he makes it all look absurdly easy – to him, not to the rest of us obviously. He plays with a slightly nonchalant comportment, a languid style born of his sheer size. What one mustn’t do, however, is confuse his elegance and grace for a lack of steeliness.

He knows what he can do and he knows when he must do it. He’s got the in-game intelligence to assess a situation – including his own – and take action accordingly. When he scored that goal in last year’s All Ireland final it looked like the conscious decision of a player to take matters into their own hands... and guess what, it was.

“I remember it fairly well,” he says.

“I just got the ball and went on a run and it opened up nicely and I picked my spot and thankfully it went in. I don’t think it would have gone there too many more times to take a shot from there.

“I kind of remember saying to myself that I needed to make something happen at the time, because the game itself wasn’t going great for me on that day. I suppose I just tried to ease my way into it. I just tried to get on a few balls before that and eased myself into it.

“I did know the significance of it at the time, yeah.”

What’s that we said about him earlier? Self-possessed. That’s the sort of thing that separates the great from the good. It’s no surprise to learn that one of his inspirations growing up was a man we’ve referenced already – Colm Cooper.

It might be a touch more surprising to hear who else he looked up to as he was growing up and coming of age.

“Outside of Kerry I’ve always looked up to Jamie Clarke for some reason,” the Tralee IT student says.

“I think something about his style of play caught my eye. I always followed him and tried to do a few things the same way as he did them. He’s one of my main heroes growing up.”

As soon as he says it, you can see it, it makes sense. Clarke is one of the stylists and Clifford, if he keeps going the way he’s going, will be right there along with him. He’s a fan of the game and a student of it too it would seem.

Sunday’s game is probably the biggest game of his young career. You could make a case that last year’s final – his first – was bigger, but this one is all about shooting for the stars, doing something that’s never been done before by a Kerry minor team.

It is fair to say that one year at minor level has very little to do with the next or the last, but to be part of the team that claimed four All Ireland minor titles in-a-row would be the type of achievement worthy of capping off his two years in the grade.

It’s by no means certain that Kerry will win this weekend. It’s by no means certain that Clifford will end his minor career on a high.

What we can be certain of is that he’ll give everything he’s got, what we can be certain of is that, win or lose, we’ve not heard the last of this remarkable talent.

Sunday marks a beginning not an end.

Last year he had the element of surprise. This year everybody knows about him and it’s made no difference

Photo by Michelle Cooper Galvin