Little things mean that Keane must be the man

FOR a few minutes he threatened to rip up the script. He was big. He was strong. He was unlike anything else they had. In short: he was a menace.

Before he arrived on the pitch the Kingdom were comfortable in defence. After Callum Brown was thrown into the fray after the halftime break and began to work his way into the game it was a different story. The big Derry man caused Kerry problems back there with his sheer size.

Last year’s Kerry minor team weren’t blessed with great height in the full-back line. The only surprising thing about Brown’s intervention was that it took Damian McErlain and his management team so long to introduce him.

Once Brown got into the swing of things he started to create panic in the ranks and once he did it didn’t take long for the man on the line to size up the situation and take corrective action.

The Kerry minor manager called Scartalgin’s Eddie Horan down from the bucket seats in the Hogan Stand and sent him into battle. Horan dropped in front of Brown and pretty much at a stroke the landscape changed.

Horan helped cut out the supply to Brown – a target for several AFL clubs – and even when Brown got the ball there wasn’t a whole pile he could do, not with Horan and co sticking to him like limpids.

This was just one little sub-plot – played out over five or six minutes in the second half – on a day dominated by David Clifford and his 4-4 from play (not forgetting his 1-4 in assists).

We mention it to make the point that inasmuch as the headline figures of Peter Keane’s managerial career are what people will cite when advocating he take up the reins as the next Kerry senior football manager, it’s the little things, the attention to detail, that make him such an outstanding candidate for the job.

Not every manager would react as quickly or as effectively to a situation like that. We saw it again last weekend with the Cahersiveen man. Keane doesn’t wait, he reacts and not in a knee-jerk way. He strikes us as the kind of guy who’s thought through everything in such detail that little fazes him.

He’s ruthless too. Second half sub Jack O’Connor was hauled ashore with ten minutes to go for Jack Kennelly, who ended up kicking the insurance score right at the end of injury time. Fortune favours the bold.

The way Kerry saw out that semi-final with Monaghan last weekend speaks well of Keane’s management as well. Minor is a grade – especially now that it’s

Under

17– where a team can be rattled and easily lose the head.

After Monaghan banged in 2-2 over the space of about five minutes, things weren’t looking promising for the Kingdom and, yet, they were able to find the composure to recover (despite being a man down) to round out the game.

Even if this was a once off thing it’d be impressive. The fact we’ve seen it before makes it doubly so. Against Cork in Austin Stack Park, Kerry also showed remarkable composure to go down the other end and score the winner. That has all the hallmarks of good coaching and good management.

It’s not all down to Keane, of course, and he’s the first to acknowledge that. He spoke fondly of his management team in the aftermath of last year’s success. He gets good people around him – Tommy Griffin and James Foley for instance – and takes it from there.

To our mind he’s the clear and obvious choice to succeed Éamonn Fitzmaurice as Kerry senior football manager.

The record we cited before is remarkable – three All Ireland minor finals in-a-row and two titles secured (for now); an All Ireland club title with his native St Marys; a county first county final appearance for Legion in over fifty years.

He’s got all the experience you need. He’s arguably got more experience now than Fitzmaurice did when he assumed the mantle in the winter of 2012. Keane will have managed teams to three All Ireland finals (four if you include the club final).

As for the argument that there’s a big step up from managing a minor team to a senior team, similar arguments were made about some of Kerry’s younger players and look how they performed this summer.

There’s no guarantee that Keane will get job. There are other strong candidates – Jack O’Connor, Diarmuid Murphy, Maurice Fitzgerald seem the most likely other contenders – but none of them bring the same combination of qualities to the table as the South Kerry business man.

With the experience he brings, Keane brings a freshness – not having been involved at senior level before – and with that experience and freshness he brings a style of football and a pragmatism that would surely find favour with the support base (and with the players). Win or lose next month’s All Ireland minor final, Keane has earned a crack at the big

job.