I know they’re probably not big hurling men – no more than myself – but Jack O’Connor and Jim McGuinness would have got plenty out of sitting their players down to watch Tipp v Cork on Sunday. It’s a while since you got such a clear and obvious lesson in advance of the football final. Who do you want to be on Monday morning, lads? The team heading back the road as heroes or the one that can’t bring themselves to do a homecoming?
All-Ireland finals can spook players. It’s very easy for them to forget what’s important. The fact that you’re in one at all means that things have been going well. Now your job is to make sure you do everything that caused you to get here in the first place.
I remember going into the 2006 final with fellas telling me I was playing great football and that I was on top of my game and all that. You can get carried away with all that stuff and maybe think that a final is the place to really embellish the whole thing. But that’s the wrong way to go about it.
Going into that final, I told myself to be conservative. Box clever. Don’t go swinging loosely and get caught by a sucker punch. All-Ireland finals aren’t about shooting the lights out, unless you’re the type of player that regularly shoots the lights out. That was never me. So I said I’d go into that final and be miserable. Be tight to the man I was marking, get in and do the dirty work. Tackles, turnovers, the basics.
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Donegal v Kerry: Throw-in time, TV details and team news about All-Ireland football final
The hurling final showed what can go wrong if you get away from all that grind. This thing can blow up in your face very quickly. Cork were six points up at half-time but the game was over when young Darragh McCarthy scored his penalty. That was only a quarter of an hour later. If I was playing in the football final this Sunday, that would be running around in my head all week. Do your job, otherwise disaster might only be 15 minutes away.
From a tactical point of view, I don’t think there’s much either manager can come up with that would be on a par with Liam Cahill playing an extra defender. Both of these teams have had their own way of playing since the start of the year and I can’t see either of them pulling a rabbit from a hat now. Part of that is because Kerry football is Kerry football and Donegal football is Donegal football.
But part of it too is that football is still very young under the new rules. If you take what we have now as being the game that came after the rule changes halfway through the league, you’re only really talking about a few months all together. I don’t doubt that in time, some enterprising coaches will sit down and start looking for a way to destroy it. But the fortnight since the semi-final isn’t long enough for that.
That’s why I think this will be an enjoyable final. It’s all still very fresh and very new and you have two teams that can play thrilling football, in their own way. I know we can still have bad games under the new rules but I don’t think this will be one.
For Kerry, a lot still revolves around David Clifford. Donegal will man-mark him obviously – I presume it will be Brendan McCole – but I don’t think they’ll drop a man in front of him. You saw how Armagh paid for that in the semi-final, with Seán O’Shea running riot in the first half because there was space out around the arc.
That distance between them is something that has really struck me about the way Kerry have set up throughout the championship. You very rarely see Clifford and O’Shea close to each other. They have tended to give each other as much space as possible. Paudie Clifford is liable to pop up anywhere but the two big scorers keep their distance from each other.
Kerry need them both to be on form because Donegal’s spread of scorers is so much wider. Clifford has played in four finals so far and he’s had good days and bad days. Funny enough, the game against Dublin in 2023 is the one everybody holds up as his big failure but I don’t see it that way. He was so close to having a brilliant game that day – a foot either way on three shots and it would have been one of the greatest All-Ireland final performances.
That’s how tight the margins are. Especially in a final like this one where there’s no big favourite and everybody agrees that these are the two best teams in the country. There’s no cause to cling to here, or no agenda for either team to lean on. Nobody will be able to say afterwards that they were written off going into the final. There’s no hiding place now.
Both teams know they left a good chance at an All-Ireland behind them last year. Both of them know the work that goes into getting back to this point. Losing is not an option for either of them. The players involved have to go beyond themselves, find that extra 10, 15 per cent that will make the difference.
My sense is that Kerry might just swing it. No player on the Donegal team is scoring as fluently as Clifford and I just think that with a dry ball and a summer’s day, he’s going to make the difference.
Kerry, narrowly.
