The Kerryman (South Kerry Edition)
Familiar faults haunt the Kingdom
Certain aspects of Kerry’s disappointing performance in Croke Park on Sunday were worryingly familiar
WHEN you can hear the players down the pitch from up on the seventh floor of Croke Park you know there’s something amiss.
“David, David, David, Paul, Paul, Paul,” and so on and so forth. It’s interesting in a way, hearing the calls and listening to how the players interact and react to whatever is happening out on the field.
That said it’s not what you go to Croke Park for now is it? All the same during a catastrophically dull first half you take whatever you can get. You do wonder though how much anybody can hear down there when the big house is full to the brim.
A wall of noise crashes down from the stands and from the Hill overwhelming everything in its path. On days like that you don’t just hear the sound, you feel it. Its absence was certainly felt on what had been billed as Super Sunday.
The atmosphere in headquarters for the final Round One game was more akin to what you might find in a morgue than a championship clash between the Connacht and the Munster champions.
It wasn’t just the absence of a crowd – there can’t have been much more than ten thousand people in the stands by the time Barry Cassidy threw in the ball – that sucked life out of the place. It was the football, which was pedestrian at best.
Of course it’s a bit of a chicken and the egg situation. Was the atmosphere insipid because the football was or was it the other way around? It was a little of both most likely, even if we suspect that no matter what kind of atmosphere the game was played in Kerry weren’t going to set the world alight on Sunday afternoon.
The Kingdom were so flat, so lifeless that to suggest their issues were related to the atmosphere would be disingenuous at the very least. It was as bad a performance as Kerry have given in Croke Park for the best part of a generation. There’s no escaping that and there’s no soft-soaping it.
Tactically Kerry got this one wrong. The way they set up – with Peter Crowley as sweeper – played into Galway’s hands. The game was played totally on the Tribesmen’s terms and played totally at a pace which suited them.
Éamonn Fitzmaurice is too often overly cautious in his approach and this was one of those occasions. It’s one thing to pay an opposition due deference, it’s another to thing to defer to them in such a way as to make them feel comfortable.
Galway were comfortable for long stretches of the game as Kerry largely mirrored their approach. The Kingdom did leave more bodies in advanced positions, but they rarely caused the sort of havoc they did in their previous championship games.
Galway, obviously, are a lot better side than either Cork or Clare and get a lot of bodies back in defence, but that doesn’t excuse how almost causal Kerry
were in transition.
Conditions played a part – the ball was greasy, turnovers prevalent. Even so the slickness of the Munster campaign dissipated worryingly in the summer rain. For whatever reason Kerry were simply not tuned in and if they had a plan it was impossible to discern.
The management team must take responsibility for that and to give Fitzmaurice his dues he admitted as much after the match, refusing to use the poverty of opposition in Munster amongst other factors as an excuse for how poor his side had been.
Kerry should have been peaking for this game. The Super 8s would have been circled in red on the Kerry manager’s calendar long before even his side claimed their sixth Munster title in succession.
The really worrying thing is just how familiar the whole thing felt, how stale it was. Even with six new players in the starting fifteen we’ve seen a lot of this before. Take the first half free count as an example.
Kerry coughed up ten frees against them to Galway’s three. A lot of that was and is down to how Kerry tackle. When Kerry come under pressure they foul. They don’t tackle with the sort of efficiency that Dublin do or Tyrone do or even as Galway do (Galway’s discipline dipped in the second half admittedly).
Another thing that was stale and overly familiar: the look of Kerry’s bench for this game. A couple of players aside – Micheál Burns, Tom O’Sullivan and Ronan Shanahan – it was a who’s who of been there, done that.
Not for the first time in a big game in Croke Park we were left scratching our heads about the manager’s substitutions. Days like Sunday were why Fitzmaurice kept Kieran Donaghy on the panel for another year and, yet, he sat unused on the bench.
Instead with the game crying out for an injection of pace or of invention the manager brings on one of the oldest guys on the panel, a guy who hadn’t played a minute of league or championship football up to that point in 2018.
With the best will in the world Donnchadh Walsh – a man who’s been a marvellous servant to Kerry football, but whose best days are in the rear-view mirror – wasn’t the right man to turn that game around on Sunday and turn it around, obviously, he did not.
There’s so much exciting young talent in the Kingdom at the moment – a lot of it in the extended Kerry panel – and yet in a crunch match Fitzmaurice turns to the players he’s worked with the longest. He needs to be bolder than that.
Of course, the Finuge man will point to form in training, but at a certain point you’ve got to put your faith in what you see in matches. Killian Spillane had a decent game in the last round of the league against Tyrone in Omagh, but he’s not even made the bench since then. Same goes for Gavin Crowley and even Ronan Shanahan.
Regardless of what’s going on in training – and for all we know he’s doing really well in there too – Shanahan has hardly put a foot wrong in games (you know the things that actually count) since he joined the panel last season and he still finds himself dropped to the bench. He’s not even second choice for the number four berth judging by Sunday after doing really well all year long.
It’s all a little puzzling and adds up to probably the most difficult and potentially consequential week of Fitzmaurice’s six-year tenure in the Kingdom hot-seat. Kerry are on the brink of exiting the championship, make no mistake about that.
How Fitzmaurice reacts to that, how his players do, will be really interesting to watch. He’s got to hope – as all Kerry fans must – that the Croke Park game was just one of those days and not part of a wider trend.
He’s got to hope that these young players can stand up and deliver for him. If not, if Monaghan win as so many expect them to, then the calls for a change of approach, for a man with fresh ideas and a new energy will become hard to resist.
Not for the first time in a big game in Croke Park we’re left scratching our heads about the substitutions