We can talk about systems all we like but football is about players. The whole point of any system is to make the players you have more effective and the ones in the other team less so. Here we are in the middle of June and we’ve seen all the teams and all the systems and all the players that will win the All-Ireland. But just as important will be the steps each team takes to stop those players.

Every county has what the Americans call franchise players. Every manager sends his team out to play a certain way. None of the top teams go out with just one game plan but there are certain players who are the first thought in the heads of his team-mates when they have possession. Where’s Michael Murphy? Where’s James O’Donoghue? Where’s Diarmuid Connolly? How do we get them into the game?

The other side of that coin is that no manager going out to play against these teams can ignore what those players bring. Anytime you hear a manager coming out with, “Ah sure, we’ll just be concentrating on getting ourselves right for the next day,” it’s time to switch stations. Managers lie to your face all the time, never more than when they say they’re not focusing on any particular opposition player. It makes up a huge part of the planning for any game.

The key to negating a franchise player is sacrifice. You have to be grown-up about it. One player has to be adult enough to accept that this is a day when all that lovely football he has learned since he was an under-six goes out the window. He’s not going to be man of the match. Probably very few people outside the panel will even know he had any sort of decent game. But the people who matter will know.

Right now, Donegal, Dublin and Kerry are the three main contenders for the All-Ireland. We don’t know yet if Mayo are the fourth contender. They might be but we don’t know. We’ll say for now that there are three-and-a-half contenders.

Dozen plans

Kildare obviously have the biggest job this weekend. Their first job is to decide who Dublin’s franchise player is. Is it Diarmuid Connolly? Is it Bernard Brogan? Michael Darragh Macauley? Stephen Cluxton? I’d make it a close run thing between Cluxton and Connolly – obviously, you need a plan for them both. Jason Ryan needs about a dozen plans, in all honesty.

Connolly has everything. There are very few players in the game who can go on a solo run with their left foot, get slapped and skelped around the place, cut back away from the tackler and kick a point with their right from beyond the 45. There’s not an awful lot you can do about a guy like that.

You don’t normally associate Dublin with that sort of beautifully balanced player. They’ve had great players down the years driving on from midfield or banging in goals inside. But never really the sort of silky, two-footed half-forward that Connolly is. So how do you get at Connolly? To me, there’s still a bit of a scamp in him. His temperament has got better over the years but I still think there’s something to be said for pulling his tail and seeing if he’ll hiss back at you.

Years ago we were doing a bit of video analysis with Jack O’Connor. Jack was pointing out some aspect of play but had to pause the video because up in the top corner of the screen Mossy Lyons was rolling around on the ground with his man. “What’s going on there, Mossy?” asked Jack. “Ah, tis oul off-the-ball stuff, Jack, you need to know no more about it.”

With a player as good as Connolly, sometimes that’s all you have left. A bit of don’t-ask-don’t-tell stuff off the ball. See if his temper is as reformed as they say. It’s nothing to be proud about but if you think a player has a weakness, you have a responsibility to find it.

Mayo’s franchise player is Keith Higgins, which is probably why we can’t yet say for sure that they’re contenders. Higgins is the best defender in the country. I’ve been banging on all winter about the man-marking job he did on James O’Donoghue in Limerick last year – I don’t think he got half enough credit for it. But even just saying he’s the best defender in the country nearly feels like you’re only giving him half-measures. I think he’s the best footballer Mayo have. He was good enough to play at centre-forward two years ago and have a real impact there.

So, if you’re facing Mayo, how do you go about stopping Higgins? Well, first of all, Mayo probably give you a bit of a head start by playing him at corner back. This is a guy who could be using his pace to get forward for two or three points a game. As it is, I think we’re only seeing him at about 70 per cent of his effectiveness.

I think James Horan saw that in him when he was in charge of Mayo and that’s why he moved him up the pitch. It was ballsy stuff and I’d liked to have seen them stick with it for a while. You could be looking at a Mayo now with three focus points in their attack – Higgins at 11 and Cillian O’Connor and Aidan O’Shea inside. That would be a lot for any defence to handle.

Let’s say they leave him at corner back though. Then you have to cancel him out by making his direct opponent sacrifice his game. He has to make sure Higgins marks him in the right areas. That will mean dragging him out to the sideline, keeping him away from where the game is happening. It means never letting him be an option for the Mayo kick-out.

Higgins is too good a defender to leave his post but there’s always a chance that eventually frustration will take over. A corner back with too much football in him can be a dangerous thing. Higgins is all-action, full of energy. I’d say he hates being out of the game for any long stretch of time.

Donegal are doing the opposite with Michael Murphy. They are getting the optimum out of him. When we looked at Murphy four or five years ago, we'd have all said he'd play his whole career at full forward. He was the ideal shape for it and could do massive damage any time he got on the ball.

Shooting the bad guys

But look how they use him. Look where he picks up the ball most often – between his own 45 and midfield, ready to set an attack in motion. Everything goes through him. He’s going around the pitch like John Wayne – he’s herding the cattle with one hand and shooting the bad guys with the other.

Rory Gallagher has found a really clever way of using him. One advantage of him playing in and around the middle of the pitch is that he conserves as much energy as possible for when Donegal need him to strike long-distance frees. I was watching the hurling on Sunday and saw Richie Hogan put a 65 wide after making a lung-bursting run. It was pure tiredness, you could see he was bet after making the run.

Look at the frees Murphy is scoring. They’re massive kicks, up to 60 metres. If he was playing inside in the full-forward line, making four runs for every ball he got and then having to jog out to take those frees, he wouldn’t be at maximum output kicking the ball.

The other side of it is that when you have him around that middle sector, everyone in the team knows there’s a simple ball they can play. The great players are a magnet for the ball. They do the right thing in high-octane situations. They play with their heads up. they don’t play nothing passes just to move the ball on.

It was like when we were playing with Seamus Moynihan in the team. If you saw Seamus coming on the burst, your options were reduced to one. Who else would you trust with the ball? This was our franchise player and we were better when he had the ball than when he didn’t.

So how do you stop Murphy? Well, as Tyrone found out, there’s not a lot you can do when it comes to the frees. But they had the right idea. Justin McMahon sacrificed his game in the same way as Aidan O’Mahony did in the All-Ireland final last year. He dogged him for the day, never moved out of his personal space. He took one for the team, completely and utterly.

Being the dog isn’t going to catch anyone’s eye. It isn’t going to be remembered favourably by the All Star selectors when the time comes. But the manager needs you to buy in. Go out, stop the other guy, go home with your medal. O’Mahony made Murphy’s day a misery and won his fifth All-Ireland. After that, who gives a damn about an All Star?

Arm’s length

I remember going into the 1999 Munster final against Cork thinking I had the upper hand on Micheál O’Sullivan. He wasn’t the biggest name in the Cork team and as far as I was concerned, I was going to be able to do my job and handle him at arm’s length. Micheál had different ideas and he took the game to me. He went at me where I thought I was strong, kicked two points and beat me up a stick.

It was one of those days where I was too arrogant and I paid the price. I thought they’d just kick it down the middle and I’d come out ahead in a man-to-man fight. But they beat me with a very simple system – the goalkeeper kept chipping the ball to the number five who ducked and left it to O’Sullivan.

There were variations but that was basically it. Next thing you know, I’m standing in the middle of Páirc Uí Chaoimh hoping to God this fella doesn’t get man of the match on The Sunday Game. No such luck.

Cork have to bring a bit of that nothing-to-lose attitude to the Munster final. Kerry are a mixed bag at the moment with Colm Cooper easing his way back in, but above all Cork will need a plan for James O’Donoghue. Keith Higgins showed that a good marker can be effective against him, so I think Cork will use James Loughrey to fill the role.

The advantage there is that besides being a tight defender, Loughrey can get forward and make O’Donoghue do the one thing corner forwards hate doing – chase back and tackle. Cork will probably double up on him as well, with a sweeper in front of him and Kieran Donaghy. One way or another, Cork can’t allow O’Donoghue to repeat the damage he did in Páirc Uí Chaoimh last year.

We always think of All-Irelands in terms of the guys who do all the scoring but you only need to go back to last year’s final to see the importance of the player whose job it is to stop the opposition.

Paul Murphy was hardly known outside Kerry before the final, while Ryan McHugh was the coming star after his two goals against Dublin. But Kerry got that match-up right, turned a Donegal strength into a weakness and Murphy ended up as the man of the match.

These are chess games now between the managers, with countless game plans and variations for each of them. It will be fascinating to watch how it all breaks down.