At a fundraising breakfast for the Kerry team in Tralee during the week Dara Ó Cinnéide was sitting alongside Kieran Donaghy and Eoin Bomber Liston, three generations of Kerry No 14s, detonating cracks and yarns. Against himself, he told a story about the evening of the 2006 All-Ireland final, the first season after Ó Cinnéide had retired, when he called into the Kerry team hotel to pay his respects.
He stepped into a lift with a couple of jubilant Kerry supporters, and anxious not to waste their audience with an All-Ireland winning Kerry captain, they gave him a piece of their mind, unfiltered; knowing who he was and forgetting who he was.
“‘Ah, t’is great,’ one of them said, innocently. ‘Donaghy had some year. We haven’t had a full forward since the Bomber’. In the few seconds it took for the lift to get to the car park you knew exactly where you were in the pecking order of Kerry full forwards,” Ó Cinnéide says, laughing.
In the continuum of Kerry football nobody stands alone on a pedestal, but space is tight, and the canonisation process takes its lead from the Vatican. Miracles must be verified. For David Clifford the rules have been relaxed, without anybody announcing the dispensation. Too much has happened. There are sworn testimonies. Everyone believes it.
What is the context for Clifford now? Already? On the back cover of Colm Gooch Cooper’s autobiography there are gushing testimonials to his brilliance. “No one that I’ve seen could lace his boots,” wrote Tomás Ó Sé. “The greatest Gaelic footballer of all time,” wrote Pat Spillane.
Gooch’s book came out just six years ago, only a few weeks after Clifford had scored 4-4 in the All-Ireland minor final. The thing about words on a page is that they’re hard to shift, like a curry stain. At the time, nobody batted an eyelid.
Opinion is a deregulated space and comparisons are unenforceable. The game changes, circumstances differ. Snapshots in time, though, are interesting. Clifford is 24 now: what was Cooper doing at that age? Maurice Fitzgerald? Mikey Sheehy? James O’Donoghue was Footballer of the Year at 24, having kicked 3-24 in a glorious summer. The load always falls on somebody.
Take Maurice Fitz. In 1993, when he was Clifford’s age, Kerry were lost in a swamp. They hadn’t won an All-Ireland since the middle of the previous decade, and had managed just one Munster title in seven years – a run that would soon stretch to one in nine. Having not played a championship match in two seasons Bomber was coaxed out of retirement, 15 years after his debut. He was 35. Cork beat them again.
“I always champion Fitzy,” says Ó Cinnéide, “because he played when we were absolute shite. I was 17 years of age [in 1992], in fifth year in school, when I was asked into Kerry senior trials. I wasn’t that good, but that was the desperation. They were so desperate to bring you through.
“Maurice was the shining light for us in that period. I used to be telling fellahs, ‘This Maurice Fitz is unreal’ – from watching him in training. And fellahs used be saying, ‘Really?’ There were a couple of years when he wasn’t exactly burning it up [in the championship], but we were only getting a game or two a year to showcase him.
“It was like those lines from the [Thomas Gray] poem, Full many a flower is born to blush unseen/And waste its sweetness on the desert air. It was that kind of thing.
“I was there in ‘93, ‘94, ‘95, ‘96 until Maurice eventually won an All-Ireland for us in ‘97. The pressure that was on him to deliver every time was huge. In ‘97 you were saying to fellahs, ‘That’s what I’ve been talking about. This man is like nothing I’ve ever seen.’”
It was different for Gooch. The group he joined in 2002 already knew how to win big in Croke Park. By the time he was Clifford’s age, in 2007, he had already amassed two All-Irelands and three All Stars. When Gooch came in first he was free to develop in his own time; Clifford was presented with a more urgent timetable.
“At 18 and a half he was in with Kerry,” says Ó Cinnéide. “He was like a cartoon character because in those days the jerseys were so loose and he was so skinny. Gooch used to come in after training and he’d be talking about, you know, teenage stuff.
“One night we were sitting together and the dinner came out and he was saying, ‘Thanks be to God for a proper meal – all I’ve eaten all day is a Wham bar.’ And we were there, ‘Wham bar?’ Are people still eating those things?’ He was still childish but he brought an energy to us, the same as Jason Sherlock did to Dublin in ‘95.”
In 2007 Kerry retained the All-Ireland and Gooch was shortlisted for Footballer of the Year. The award, though, went to Declan O’Sullivan. That was the depth of the Kerry attack.
“He lost his father the year before,” says Ó Cinnéide, “and that rattled him. He grew up a bit – matured an awful lot. Hardened him a bit, I’d say. But, again, he was surrounded by really good players. Declan O’Sullivan was a serious operator. Donaghy was taking a lot of the heat off him in terms of fanfare. Paul Galvin was a big name and a big personality. Gooch could go about his business. He was the most talented forward in there, but the pressure wasn’t on him like it is on Clifford now.”
James O’Donoghue joined the panel in 2010, when Gooch was still in his prime. “Gooch was like a god,” says O’Donoghue. “It was like nothing I’d seen before. His movement, his attitude, his confidence. Just a sound fellah, playing unbelievable football. It would inspire you, but it was also a bit daunting because you were thinking, ‘I’m never going to get to that level.’”
In O’Donoghue’s Footballer of the Year season Gooch was missing, injured. He was already an All Star from the previous year and more of the burden for scoring naturally landed on him. But Paul Geaney was very productive that season too – averaging nearly four scores a game – and so was Donaghy. For a variety of reasons O’Donoghue failed to score in the final, but the Kerry attack wasn’t going to stand or fall on that omission.
“We changed up the system in the final and I played out the field,” O’Donoghue says. “Something that Clifford has in his armoury – that I didn’t have – is when Clifford comes out to centre forward he has a rocket of a shot. He can swing it over from 45 yards. I was never going to get those shots off. I didn’t feel more responsibility to be a leader in the attack [with Gooch missing]. I suppose it was the chemistry we all had – it was never a case of the pressure is one fellah. If it was, I’d have crumbled.
“We’ve talked about it a lot in Kerry – when you’re part of a team and you see one fellah is so good, and he’s on form, you slip into the mindset of, ‘We’ll keep giving him the ball.’ Even to the detriment, maybe, of your own game. It might be important for fellahs to think, ‘Do you know what, I still need to swing over my two or three points’ The thing about Clifford, though, is that the bigger the moment, the more he wants to take it on – which is what you want from your leader.”
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There is a reluctance in Kerry, says O’Donoghue, to compare players from different generations. What’s the point? You only end up reducing a player you loved, for the sake of what? But there is an acceptance, he says, that nobody has seen anything like Clifford. That argument is over.
“We haven’t even seen the full range of Clifford yet, I think,” says Ó Cinnéide.
Mikey Sheehy was Clifford’s age in 1978, a glittering star in the greatest forward line of all time. Kerry beat Dublin by 17 points in the final, on the day that Sheehy lobbed Paddy Cullen from a free for one of the most audacious goals ever scored in an All-Ireland.
Clifford hasn’t done that. Not yet.
