I would say the Dublin superclubs bring decent enough support when they go on a roll.
The Kerry club model is totally centred towards the elite clubs with only 8 senior teams, they are nearly all big urban teams with the exception of Templenoe.
If 12 clubs were Senior it would weaken East Kerry and lessen the elitist model.
There are even greater problems hitting Kerry football in that South Kerry and other rural areas that traditionally produced loads of players are growing smaller and smaller. Valentia will be the first to go.
In the big towns the clubs like NA Gael, Fossa and Kilcummin are benefitting from the spread of the Towns but the super clubs struggle to cope with their huge numbers. I say making the dr.Crokes u13 team would be like a county trial.
Aye
I presume the lads who think seanie o Shea should have been sent of in the Semi final wanted to see the Galway lad red carded for this follow through.
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Sean O Sullivan and Donnchadh Walsh were winning All Irelands as the 2 wing forwards for Kerry and lining out as a midfield pairing for Cromane in the lowest tier at club level. Both playing for Mid Kerry though in the senior level.
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The North Kerry divisional teams are cack at the moment also.
I think they have 2 teams up there, is it Shannon rangers and another one.
Clubs up there weak currently, population a problem too.
If he kicked him twice and the second time in the head then maybe….
But sure lookit them’s the breaks and there is always next year
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Well if thats the case they shouldn’t be allowed in county championships either. Divisional teams suck the life out of championships.
GGA promoting Sinn Féin/IRA terrorists yet again. I’m not calling Grace Gifford a terrorist but her other half was. I’ve tweeted Emma Little Pengelly and I encourage you all to do likewise.
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Brian Kerr was once on the late lamented “panel” on the RTE Sports Review Of The Year and when the discussion turned to rugby he expressed his bafflement at why Munster would play Leicester etc.
“Leicester is a club, but Munster is a province, I don’t understand why Leicester have to play Munster, that seems unfair to me, I don’t get it.”
I’d be intrigued to find out what he would think of the divisional system used in the Kerry* club championship, sorry, county championship.
*And Cork.
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Lucky All Ireland for Kerry. Would have been well beaten by Dublin if Con was fit.
Kieran Shannon: Jack O’Connor and Kerry earned their luck in this Championship
Peter Keane deserves to be acknowledged for how good and unfortunate he was. But in O’Connor Kerry have more than a lucky general
WINNER: Kerry manager Jack O’Connor during the homecoming celebrations of the All-Ireland Senior Football Champions Kerry in Tralee, Kerry. Pic: Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile
TUE, 26 JUL, 2022 - 07:30
KIERAN SHANNON
Although he wasn’t a great man himself to acknowledge the contribution of others who had gone before him (having not even picked up the phone to those he culled in the autumn of 2018), there was something quite sad about Peter Keane being barely mentioned on Sunday evening by his former charges or anyone else.
Maybe it would have been a bit much all right for Seán O’Shea to go all Peter Canavan and laud his former manager in the manner that Tyrone deity shone a light from the steps of the Hogan Stand on the work and legacy of Art McRory and Eugene McKenna.
McRory had been by a distance Tyrone’s best manager before the advent of Mickey Harte, McKenna one of the county’s finest-ever players. Keane, for all his achievements, would not have the same historical importance within his county.
Canavan had been speaking as the first Tyrone man to ever lift Sam Maguire. Last Sunday, while ending what constituted a mini-famine by Kerry standards, hardly qualified as a breakthrough of similar stature and which demanded the oratory and nods to yesteryear which a Tyrone 2003 or Clare 1995 did.
Last year when winning All Irelands was less of a novelty for Tyrone, captain Padraig Hampsey saved any references to Mickey Harte and all his heavy lifting for later occasions; the steps of the Hogan was neither the time nor the place. O’Shea was hardly being insensitive or inconsiderate by similarly restricting his praise to the existing management team and not its predecessors.
Still, as the evening went on and more and more players were being interviewed and pundits were opining and Jack O’Connor and his management was being increasingly heralded, we couldn’t help but spare a thought for Keane and proffer a penny for his thoughts, all the more so for how little he seemed to feature in those of the current camp or the RTE studio.
In many ways Keane can go down as an unlucky general and not just because he tumbled down Carrauntoohil only days after his team fell out of the championship.
In his first year in charge he barely put a foot wrong, bringing a young team to the brink of creating – or denying – history by almost beating the best team in history.
The following spring his team came out of the traps putting down the kind of markers that Jack O’Connor’s would in 2022. Just as Jack would later put great store in his team edging Mayo by a point in Tralee, Keane’s team would show their mettle and hold their nerve to win by that margin against not just Mayo in Castlebar but a rampant Galway under the lights of Austin Stack Park. Their only slip up was a one-point loss to Tyrone, again just like Jack this year.
Then came Covid, changing and disrupting everything. Your momentum. Your access to players. Your preparations. We told ourselves that winter that any football played that year would be a bonus, a gift. Everything was to be celebrated, no one was to be castigated, that was until Mark Keane put the ball in a Kerry net.
The following season teams and managers were similarly compromised for long periods. Keane and Kerry made a better fist of it than most, retaining the league, blitzing everything in their wake in Munster only then to lose by a point to the eventual All Ireland champions in extra time.
In Galway they had both the sense and the empathy to recognise that 2020 and 2021 hadn’t been your normal two years for a county manager or anyone else; you couldn’t judge or dismiss him on account of those two years. Thus Pádraic Joyce, who would have been the subject of some hard truths from his own players in their post-season review, was retained in Galway.
In Kerry no such dispensation or extension was forthcoming for Keane. Yet just like Galway their decision as to who to go with in 2022 has been completely vindicated.
In Jack O’Connor they recognised a general of the kind Napoleon favoured. And in many ways O’Connor has continued to have the kind of luck that escaped Keane. In last year’s semi-final Keane had to contend with losing David Clifford in extra time. In this year’s semi-final O’Connor didn’t have to contend with Con O’Callaghan. Either player, you’d have to think, would have been worth at least a point.
O’Connor has admitted that Kerry were off the required standard in the first half of Sunday’s final, prompting him to give them a jolt at halftime. Against a Dublin in 2019 that would have been too late. The altitude and opponent would have been far more unforgiving.
In 2021 Keane wouldn’t have had the games programme for his team to be adequately road-tested. With the league operating on a conference basis, they’d only get one game against northern opposition, an indifferent Tyrone team in a league semi-final in Killarney. By the time they’d encounter a second, Tyrone were a different animal, having come through the jungle that’s Ulster.
Often it takes a game, a defeat, to realise what some of your issues are. For Kerry, it took playing Tyrone’s defensive shape in championship to realise their propensity to take the ball unnecessarily into contact and lose it. They finally had a large enough sample of games to work from to know what they’d to work on. But Keane would never get that chance.
That opportunity would instead fall to O’Connor. And how he has optimised it and everything else with this group.
It’s one thing to recognise a team’s issues and flaws; another to rectify them. O’Connor did so by surrounding himself with a coaching team, largely made up of recent Division Two managers – Mícheal Quirke, Paddy Tally as well as himself, that drastically reduced the number of goals and turnovers Kerry cough up.
It can be forgotten just what a marvellous innate sense for the game itself O’Connor possesses. Watching Graham O’Sullivan pump ball into the Galway D last weekend triggered flashbacks of Tomás Ó Sé bombing ball into the same landing zone in 2004 and 2006, O’Connor having identified that just as Mayo’s fullback line wasn’t as accustomed to dealing with such high ball, the Galway goalkeeper wasn’t comfortable with it either.
And recognising now there is a forward mark, a luxury that wasn’t there back in Crowley’s and Donaghy’s time. The consensus prior to last Sunday had been that the advanced mark has done little for the game. After how it helped showcase the talent and increase the scoring return of the sport’s outstanding player, maybe that view needs to be revised. Either way it has been good for O’Connor and Kerry because he identified its possibilities.
His in-game coaching is exceptionally sharp, honed from coaching hundreds of colleges games all the way up to his time with Kildare, a stint that has been largely underappreciated by others but highly invaluable to the man himself. A more conservative and inexperienced manager would have opted to keep David Moran and Paul Geaney on beyond halftime, the pair of them being two of only four starters that had previously managed to get across the line in an All Ireland before. O’Connor didn’t flinch.
From his time with Kildare he also linked up with Tony Griffin who has connected with these Kerry players in a way his predecessors in that realm couldn’t. His interactions with them were both more sports-specific and person-centred.
O’Connor himself has a capacity to relate to and communicate with players; under Keane players wouldn’t be sounded out for their views anything near as often as they are under O’Connor. That extends to the clubs and their managers. By talking to and working with the clubs, and regularly releasing panel members to play county league games, he created a sense of goodwill and harmony that would not have been there in previous years.
And while O’Connor has not been quite as effusive as he was during his previous incarnations as Kerry manager, dealing with the media is not a chore to him the way it was to Keane.
On Sunday night he acknowledged that while they were under pressure to finally get over the line, he himself is at the stage where he is immune to it; if anything he has come to embrace it. That approach, along with his reputation as a winner, that sense Jack has this, alleviated the pressure for his players in a way Keane, for all his qualities, couldn’t.
Keane deserves to be acknowledged for how good and unfortunate he was. But in O’Connor Kerry have more than a lucky general. They have someone who has become a masterful, all-rounded one. Any luck he and Kerry got this year, they earned.
Paudie Clifford savours the destination after long journey
Four years ago, Clifford’s first-half goal in the All-Ireland junior final of 2018 ultimately beat Galway and secured the fourth leg of a junior five-in-a-row for Kerry
SCARS OF BATTLE: Paudie Clifford and his teammates during the homecoming celebrations of the All-Ireland Senior Football Champions Kerry in Tralee, Kerry. Pic: Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile
TUE, 26 JUL, 2022 - 07:00
PAUL KEANE
The last time Paudie Clifford got the better of Galway in an All-Ireland final, before last Sunday that is, he was a Kerry junior footballer.
That was four years ago, his first-half goal in the Ennis decider of 2018 ultimately separating the teams and securing the fourth leg of a junior five-in-a-row for Kerry.
A fortnight earlier, Clifford scored 1-3 in the junior semi-final defeat of Kildare, prompting manager Jimmy Keane to state that in talent terms, there was no discernible gap between the two Cliffords, even if sibling David was already a senior star.
“I do really believe that,” said Keane at the time. "Maybe David got more high profile recognition through the minors with Kerry. He’s been seen so much on television and stuff like that whereas Paudie would have maybe been a late developer.
“Paudie, at David’s age, wouldn’t have had that size, he wouldn’t have been physically as big. It’s only now that Paudie is beginning to come out and play the football that he can, since he’s got physically stronger. He’s able to take the tackles.”
Fast forward to the present and Clifford the elder is an established senior now himself, closing in on his second All-Star award and, crucially, an All-Ireland senior medallist.
Having been overlooked at minor and U-21 level, and farmed off to the juniors for a couple of years, you could describe it as a victory for hard work and patience.
“Yeah, it is, that’s probably a good way to describe it,” nodded Clifford. "It’s been a lot of hard work, a lot of years of not being picked and yeah, a lot of failures along the way. But it feels good now, yeah.
"He (David) was always a big help in fairness and I always enjoyed playing with my club, so that was what kept me going.
"When I played with my club, I loved it and we had great craic, craic after games and craic after training.
“So there was never any question of anything like, ‘Oh, you’re not going to play football any more’. All I had to do was play well, keep doing my thing and just hope that maybe I would get called up.”
East Kerry’s 2019 county championship win, their first in 20 years, helped Clifford’s cause. The following season they retained the title.
“They were the key because they put me on the map,” acknowledged Clifford. "Because you were marking some of the backs in county championship games that were playing for us (Kerry), and I was doing relatively well.
“So you’re getting more belief and obviously the management can see that too so yeah, they were the main things that counted.”
On Sunday evening, RTÉ’s Sunday Game panel included both Cliffords in their Team of the Year selection, Paudie at number 10 and David ahead of him in the right corner. They both won All-Stars last year.
Their games, of course, are chalk and cheese. While David is constantly compared to Maurice Fitzgerald, Andy Moran was on the money last year when he suggested that Paudie is more in the Paul Galvin mould.
As if to underline his thirst for a firefight, Paudie’s two points against Galway on Sunday came in the second-half when the need was greatest. The same against Dublin.
“Whoever I’m marking, I just kind of think, ‘Keep wearing them down’,” he said. "In the first-half, it was tight and Galway got bodies back, and they got them back fast and there just wasn’t much space.
“I just had to keep at it and often the games do open up more in the second-half, when bodies are getting a bit tired, and teams are bringing on subs who mightn’t be quite as tuned into the game plan as the starters.”
Just two and a half years older than David, Paudie has time on his side to add to his medals haul.
“Yeah, hopefully, but look, they’re not easily won and we just had to get over the line this year,” he said. “We hope we can win a few more but we’ll have to wait and see. We know Dublin are going to be very strong again and Galway are young as well, Tyrone will be back and there are other teams too. It remains to be seen but obviously we hope so.”
I didn’t realise o connor was involved in 97 as well.
“Peter Keane deserves to be acknowledged”
Lol
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That Kieran Shannon is a woejus clown.
Failing to put away the 14 man Dubs, he should’ve gone then Had plenty of chances at it and they never improved. A bit like Kingston in Cork although Cork were very unlucky against Galway this year.