4 days ago
Kerry have been cut tight to the bone, relying on a great player to get past Armagh
IN THE WEE hours of the morning after their 2022 All-Ireland final win, one Kerry friend of this column was more looking through rather than drinking out of a half empty glass.
Amid giddy talk of one fallen blue dynasty begetting a new green and gold one, he offered up a more sober perspective of what the future would hold for the newly crowned All-Ireland champions with a measure that would be easily if uncomfortably understood by every Kerry person.
'I will tell you now, if David Clifford ends up with the same All-Ireland medal haul as Maurice Fitzgerald, he will do well,' he suggested, albeit to some derision.
With every passing year, what was once seen as a modest molehill to clamber takes on the look of an ever steeper hill to scale.
Maurice Fitzgerald ended with two, which is still twice as many as Clifford, but the disparity feels even greater than that.
The Caherciveen maestro won his medals at the end of a career that once only offered – or, perhaps, more likely threatened – a legacy as the best player from the county not to win a Celtic Cross, inflating their worth in the process.
Clifford, somehow an even more illuminating talent, won his one early enough in his career to invite the prospect of having several others for show, which if it does not come to pass will only have a deflationary impact on those who measure worth by numbers.
And the real fear in Kerry today as they head to Croke Park to take on the All-Ireland champions Armagh is that the only counting they will have to do is to simply count out another year.
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That stark? Pretty much so.
Others who make their living out of counting think so too; Kerry the standout favourites at the start of the summer are the very obvious 6/4 underdogs this afternoon, and given that the market factors in tradition when pricing the Kingdom, the price based purely on form is even bigger than that.
Kerry's hope is that with their backs pressed against the wall, they will find something deep that will deliver a performance that will give them a real chance. Perhaps, one on a scale of what they managed in the first half of the 2022 semi-final against Dublin, but which exhausted them to the point that they spent most of the second half, fighting on the ropes and gasping for air.
The good news for them is finding that should not take a lot of searching, given that it is Armagh they face.
It's hardly no coincidence that Kerry's best performance of a patchy season was in the penultimate round league game in Tralee when last year's semi-final defeat to the Orchard County was on their mind, as they racked up a 10-point win playing with such fire that Kieran McGeeney opined afterwards that his players were 'bullied' off the pitch.
Mind, they were played off it too.
But it is hard to ignore the truth in that old line that if revenge is all that you have got going, it is best to dig two graves, including one for yourself.
The Limerick hurlers found that out this summer when in expunging last year's semi-final loss to Cork, they vaporised the Rebels with the perfect display in a group game, the result of which did not really matter and after that found that their capacity to be the best versions of their great selves had been drained empty.
It is not that Kerry will have been sated by a league win, but the price for it has left them in significant debt as two minutes from the end of that game, the mood of their season had already coloured a shade darker when Diarmuid O'Connor went to ground clutching his shoulder.
He had added further to his citation that evening as the game's top midfielder during the spring with another dominant performance, assisting for three points but even more importantly freeing up Joe O'Connor to thrive in a half-forward line alongside Paudie Clifford, with the prospect of Sean O'Shea still to come back.
It was the lack of physicality in that line in particular which Armagh had so pointedly exploited in last year's semi-final, and it felt prior to O'Connor's injury – one despite efforts to rehabilitate has haunted the player – Kerry had constructed a fix.
But no longer as O'Connor's absence compounded by ongoing fitness concerns about Paudie Clifford – who is named to start today on the bench – and with Joe O'Connor likely to have to put his shoulder to the wheel in a deeper role, Kerry may well return to Croke Park today as an angrier team than 12 months ago, but hardly as a better one.
And that's not just because of bad luck; in a condensed season and in a new game far more demanding of players, injuries are a fact of life which every one has to factor in, but only the strongest and deepest can do so well.
A group like Armagh, for instance, who for large swathes of the season have been without key players such as Aaron McKay, Aidan Forker, Niall Grimley, Oisin O'Neill and Rian O'Neill among others, but have continued to evolve and become better, not least because of what the likes of Ethan Rafferty, Ross McQuillan, Darragh McMullan and a rejuvenated Jarly Óg Burns has brought to them.
That is why Armagh, a team deemed by many to be one-off champions, have the feel of a back-to-back championship winning team.
And it is why Kerry look like pretty much what they are; a team cut hopelessly tight to the bone with a great player rolling a boulder up a sheer hill face.
Where the only counting doing business is the number of times it rolls back down.
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