The Kerryman (South Kerry Edition)
Double header in Dublin
Kerry’s double date with All-Ireland champions
KERRY are facing Dublin’s All-Ireland football champions on the double on Saturday evening with an intriguing National League Division 1 double-header in Croke Park.
The men will be looking to bounce back from defeats to Monaghan and Galway on successive weekends when they face the All-Ireland champions at 7pm, with the curtain-raiser pitting the Kingdom’s women, who have also lost their last two games to Galway and Monaghan, against the All-Ireland champions at 5pm.
In a rematch of last April’s League Final, Eamonn Fitzmaurice and Jim Gavin’s teams meet for the first time since Kerry halted Dublin’s record-breaking unbeaten run in that game, but the Dubs have already built up another 10-game unbeaten run in the League and Championship since then.
Kerry will assess Paul Geaney this week after the Dingle man was substituted late in the Galway game with a head injury after a clash of heads with an opponent.
Dublin look like they will be without Paul Mannion for Saturday’s game after he picked up a hamstring injury in the win over Mayo last Saturday night.
Kerry’s defeat to Galway sees the League champions stay in fourth position after four rounds, two points behind Monaghan and four behind Dublin and Galway.
While disappointed to have dropped points at home, Fitzmaurice was sanguine after the Galway defeat.
“We never expected to win every game in this campaign. You can only look at what is in front of you at this level because there are plenty of teams that will punish you if you get ahead of yourself,” he said.
“We still have four points on the board and are still taking every game as it comes. Saturday night is a huge opportunity for the lads to show what they can do in Croke Park against a Dublin side on full points and one that is going very well at the moment.”
The evening’s action in Croke Park gets underway at 5pm with the Kerry ladies facing an extremely tough challenge against Dublin, who sit on top of Division 1 with four wins from their first four games, including a 2-8 to 0-12 win over Mayo last Saturday in Castlebar.
With just one win - also against Mayo - from four games, Kerry manager Graham Shine is confident that his team can and will improve and rise to the challenge of the All-Ireland champions.
“The girls have been looking forward to the game in Croke Park since the fixtures came out. [Sunday] was a bad day but I know that we will raise our game for next Saturday,” Shine said after Kerry’s defeat to Galway in Killarney.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have much time to work with the girls before then. We will train on Tuesday, but with so many away in college there’s not a massive amount we can do.”
Dublin v Kerry
Saturday, March 3 Croke Park, Dublin Throw-in at 7pm THERE’S no doubt that if next weekend’s GAA fixtures survive the ominous weather warnings, Kerry might be side-stepping one beast from the east only to crash headlong into another. Presumably the marketing people are on the case already, but there’s hardly a better opportunity than Saturday’s meeting of League champions Kerry and All-Ireland champions Dublin to roll out the ‘Fire and Ice’ campaign, replete with Game of Thrones-styled footballers going hammer and tongs on an icy Croke Park wasteland.
We’ll try to park the weather references at that, except to say that assuming the game can go ahead on Saturday evening the expectation is that the protagonists out on the pitch, shorts and all, are sure to be considerably warmer than those of us up in the rafters of the Hogan Stand. It is ever thus, but this meeting of Kerry and Dublin should be every bit as heated – we hope
– as in the reverse fixture in Tralee just shy of 12 months ago.
That game should be the touchstone for this rematch, more so than the slightly more recent League Final in Croke Park last
April, but in almost
every respect next Saturday’s meeting plays to a whole new script.
Last March’s game in Tralee was – despite what was or wasn’t said at the time – very much coloured by Dublin’s then unbeaten streak and Kerry’s chance to end same, and in doing so preserve the hitherto longest unbeaten League / Championship run set by Kerry back in the early 1930s. That Dublin rescued a heroic draw in added-time merely underscored an incredibly tetchy game in a packed Austin Stack Park, although little enough of that animosity carried through to the following month’s League Final, which Kerry won by a point. There was a slight sense in that League final that both teams were playing within themselves a small bit on the implied understanding that there’d be a Championship meeting later in the year. That, as we know, never materialised.
After four rounds Dublin look all but certain to finish in the top two places in the division and qualify for the final. The defending champion’s position is far less clear. Two wins followed by two defeats leaves Kerry mid-table, and they will need two more points to be sure of staying in the division. That said, such are the small margins in the division that two more wins could get Kerry into the top two final placings, but Galway’s current form looks likely to prevent a repeat of last year’s League final. Therefore, Saturday’s game could well be the only one between Kerry and Dublin from April 2017 to August 2018.
That in itself won’t colour either management team in how they approach this game: for Kerry it’s just another game along the spring process of incubating the younger players to be ready for summer football; for Dublin, it’s another game with fairly similar motives.
Brian Kelly – apart from having a very solid game against Galway – is probably going to retain the no.1 jersey, while it would make sense to retain Jason Foley and Ronan Shanahan in defence to see how they will measure up against some of the best forwards in the country. It remains to be seen if Gavin Crowley recovers in time to feature, but a match-up with Diarmuid Connolly (remember Connolly’s black card in the League Final?) would make for interesting watching.
On the back of his performance last Sunday, Brian Ó Beaglaoich will consider himself fortunate to retain his starting place, and while there is one argument for persevering with these younger players through thick and thin, there’s a counter-argument that says that just as good form must be rewarded poor form and performances must be penalised.
It’s a similar situation in the attack where there would be no justifiable case not to play David Clifford and Seán O’Shea, and while Micheál Burns’ hard running style would be ideal against Dublin, the management may wish to hand a start to another emerging forward like Killian Spillane or Éanna Ó Conchúir.
Whatever personnel Kerry opt for is one thing, but they will have to address the porous defence they’ve shown in all four games to date. While the concession of three goals against Donegal could be somewhat excused because it was the squad’s first day out, no such allowances can be made for the one-on-one chances given up to Galway last weekend. It’s unlikely Dean Rock or Kevin McManamon or Paddy Andrews would be as wasteful as a couple of the Galway forwards.
To have a chance of winning Kerry need to apply real and meaningful pressure on Dublin’s middle eight and not allow them dictate the terms with their patient and deliberate build-up.
Kerry need to pressure Cluxton’s kick-outs and force him to go long on occasions, And they need to compete with Brian Fenton and Michael Darragh MacAuley and James McCarthy for those midfield possessions.
Kerry need to transfer the ball fast into Clifford and Paul Geaney and seek to get those forwards into one v one situations with their markers.
Above all, Kerry need to have a water-tight defensive plan and stick to it, rather than playing a free-wheeling defence as they did too often against Galway.
Kerry proved last year that they could rattle Dublin and unsettle them and equal them and then beat them. But that was then and this is now and for a few players like Clifford and O’Shea and Foley this will be a huge step up in anything they’ve experience before.
Assuming Dublin bring their A game to proceedings it’s hard to foresee anything other than a Dublin win, but we probably thought that last March and April too.