I looked up at the clock on the Davin Stand and it was coming up to 3:55pm and Kerry were 0-12 to 0-4 up. My old brain is still conditioned to look at that and think, “Christ, those 25 minutes flew by”. But of course, there wasn’t 25 minutes gone at all. The game started late because of all the stuff beforehand – the same thing happened with the hurling final, which means somebody somewhere messed up two weeks in a row.
Add in the fact that the referee stops the clock at the drop of a hat now and actually, when I looked at the scoreboard, the game clock said only 15 minutes were gone altogether. I looked down at the pitch at the Donegal players and thought “that’s a lot of football played in 15 minutes to be 12-4 down”.
Kerry got the next point too – 0-13 to 0-4 in an All-Ireland final before you’ve even got your feet under you. There’s no pussyfooting around a scoreline like that. It means one team came to the final in exactly the right frame of mind and the other didn’t. One team came to win Sam Maguire, the other came to see if they could hang in the fight and take it down the stretch.
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I expected better from Donegal in that regard. I’ve said it a million times – All-Ireland finals are about throwing yourself into everything full bore. You can’t sit around and wait on it to come to you. Everything is heightened, from the minute you get out of bed that morning. This is the day to go after things like you’ve never done before.
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When the stakes go up like that, you have to get up to meet them. It’s like if you’re playing poker and some fella starts throwing 50 into the pot on every hand. Okay, so it’s a bit annoying if you’re just trying to have a friendly game. But when it comes down to it, you can only keep folding to him for so long. Eventually, you have to either call him, raise him or get the jump on him in the next hand.
Donegal didn’t do any of that. I expected more from Jim McGuinness. My big doubt from a Kerry point of view going into the game was that Donegal would target the newer fellas on the team, the likes of Mark O’Shea and Seán O’Brien, and start raining kick-outs down on them. Not alone did they shy away from that, McGuinness dropped Hugh McFadden so that Caolan McGonagle could come in as an extra defender.
It wasn’t until McFadden and Jason McGee came on in the second half that they started to get a bit of traction around the middle of the pitch. But why wait until then? They were nine points down after 15 minutes and getting cleaned out at midfield. That was when the game needed to be changed.
I thought McGuinness gave himself away a bit afterwards when he talked about how Donegal wanted a game where both sides controlled possession. That wasn’t the game Kerry came to play. They didn’t want to control possession, they wanted to use possession. They wanted to inflict possession on Donegal.
The ultimate example is Gavin White coming like a steam train at the very start of both halves. Ciarán Thompson was five yards behind him for the first one and Ciarán Moore was the same at the start of the second half. Once is bad enough but surely to God someone said at half-time in the Donegal dressingroom that whatever happens, Gavin White is to be tagged at the throw-in.
Ryan McHugh was the only one who seemed tuned in and he went to try to stop him but Gavin had a full head of steam built up at that stage and he blew straight through him. Kerry scored at the end of it and McHugh had to be taken off – it looked like his shoulder or collarbone. That nearly summed up the difference in how both teams went after the day.
It was a phenomenal performance from Kerry. It’s very hard to find a silver lining for Donegal because who knows when they’ll be back? So many of their players went back home on the bus knowing they came to an All-Ireland final and didn’t leave any sort of mark on the day. It’s going to take them a long time to make their peace with that.
Kerry don’t have any such issue. I’ve always said you need a benchmark of 11 or 12 players playing up to scratch to win a final and Kerry surpassed that. What really struck me on Sunday watching them was the level of concentration every one of them carried through the game. The game plan was implemented to the letter.
David Clifford was happy enough not to be involved until he needed to be. His first two-pointer came from a turnover. It was as if he was strolling around and then as soon as he saw a mistake, he pounced. His standards are different from everybody else – imagine scoring 1-25 against Armagh, Tyrone and Donegal and not being named man of the match even once!
I brought the kids in to see the homecoming in Tralee on Monday night and the sense of satisfaction and joy is huge around the place. Not alone did Kerry win a brilliant All-Ireland but they did it with players who people weren’t sure about. Winning on Sunday didn’t change the way anybody looks at the likes of David Clifford, Paudie Clifford or Seán O’Shea. But what it did was move a few of the others to a new level.
Joe O’Connor, Mark O’Shea, Sean O’Brien. Even the likes of Brian Ó Beaglaoich and Jason Foley, these games transformed them into huge leaders. Every one of them is an established player now with huge credit in the bank whenever the wheel turns and people start doubting them again. You can’t buy the experience these lads got over the past month.
It was a complete team performance. Any changes that were made, the team adapted to. Diarmuid O’Connor came on and slipped in seamlessly. The communication with each other continued all the way through the whole game. It was as good a championship performance as you’d ever see, even more so than the Armagh game.
Add it up together and all is good in the Kingdom again.
