The Kerryman (South Kerry Edition)
Kerry’s challenge made the year
The drive for five defined 2019, but Kerry’s challenge to the Dubs is what made it special
THOSE were the golden moments, those moments when hope and dreams and reality melded, bleeding into each other leading you to believe that the impossible just might be possible after all.
We’ll admit it freely. We doubted it could be done. From the minute the semi-finals were done and dusted our mind was clear: Dublin were going to win and they were going to win relatively comfortably. Something in the five or six point range we supposed.
Nothing we saw in the drawn game changed us from that contention. There was too much contingent on Jonny Cooper’s sending off. Too much contingent on things going just the way Kerry would have liked and too many things going against the Dubs.
Caught out by the twin substitutions of Tommy Walsh and Killian Spillane once, yes that we could understand. Twice?
Nopes, no, not going to happen. Not to Jim Gavin. Not to Dublin. If anything Dublin’s stubborn refusal to die that first day simply confirmed their greatness for us.
Their studied refusal to panic was breath-taking. Everything, literally everything, was on the line. The sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. History, fate, the five in-a-row, all of it and Dublin sucked it up and played their own game.
It’s fine to say that’s what they should have been doing in that moment, that’s what the coaching manual would say, that’s what years of training and conditioning would have told them to do, there’s no planning for pressure like that though. Or so we would have thought.
Dublin, literally did, just take it as another game against any other opposition. Some people seemed to think that the Dubs were spooked by the occasion, by the hand of history, by the green and gold and maybe there were spells when they were, but there in the minutes when they absolutely had to deliver they got back to basics.
They forced the Kingdom into mistakes, into turnovers, sucked them into contact and challenge, while holding the ball jealously when they got hold of it themselves. Save for a couple of slightly hopeful long-distance efforts – one from the returning Diarmuid Connolly – Dublin owned the ball in the last five or six minutes.
Kerry had the lead. Dublin the momentum. The equaliser when it came was fairly inevitable given how the Dubs were playing. And then, when Dean Rock missed his (really difficult) chance to finish it off it felt a relief to Kerry to get out of Dodge intact.
In a game everybody was saying they should have won – and maybe they should have as everybody insists – it shouldn’t be forgotten that Dublin were the ones with the last gasp chance to finish it out. They were the ones making the running. The ones with history in their hands.
Still the fact Kerry were still standing at the end of seventy minutes of pulsating action had to count for something. The thirteen or fourteen guys without experience of playing in an All Ireland final now had it. The manager was no longer an All Ireland Senior (stress on senior) Football Final rookie.
Did all that mean Kerry had a better chance second day out than first? Probably it did. All the same were any of us hugely surprised when Dublin carried on where they left off in the drawn final. Like men on a mission. Men ready to put this thing to bed nice and early. Show Kerry who’s boss. Gradually though the worm began to turn in the first half of the replay.
Kerry powered back into contention. Dublin had thrown everything at Kerry and Kerry were still standing, still smiling, still they rose, indefatigable, fearless... the fearlessness of youth.
Once they Kingdom brought it back to a level game at half-time in the replay – at ten points a piece – for the first time (save for those fleeting moments in the drawn game when they led and looked set to push on) we believed, truly believed, that Kerry could do it. Win the All Ireland, deny the Dubs the five in-a-row, write themselves into the history books. Darbys one and all.
Doubts blown away by the evidence of our eyes. A Dublin whirlwind withstood. In those glorious fifteen minutes at halftime everything and anything seemed possible. Powder kept dry – Walsh and Spillane left on the bench for the first half – with Dublin surely left wondering how they were going to be able to shake off these tireless young tyros.
The excitement was palpable and then just like that it was gone, all gone. A pin popping a balloon mere seconds after the ball was throw-in. Jack Barry’s screening, David Moran’s leap and punch. Eoin Murchan snapping up the break and taking off.
All of it played out in the space of about twenty seconds max.
The footage has been played and replayed over and over by Kerry fans and neutrals alike – the Kerry version of the Zapruder film. Did Moran need to punch it? Did Murchan take too many steps?
Maybe not and maybe so, there’s not much point torturing yourself over it now. It is what it is, it’s not going to change what happened, it’s not going to change the final result. History happens in the blink of an eye and there it was history staring us in the face.
Lenin once said that sometimes there are decades where nothing happens and then there are weeks where decades happen. In those thirty seconds an epoch was capped. Beautiful for the Dubs, a terrible beauty if you’re looking at it from any other part of the country.
Still though the fact Kerry were there, that we had those moments where it looked like the drive for five could be stopped gives us hope anew. Yes the last time we had hope it was snuffed out in the blink of an eye – that’s the cruelty and glory of sport – but hope is not a finite resource. It springs eternal.
Kerry will be back. The Dubs will be caught. History awaits in 2020. It always does.
In those thirty seconds an epoch was capped. Beautiful for the Dubs, a terrible beauty for everyone else