Give it a rest ffs.
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The Cliff has well and truly gone and mentally destroyed a full county.
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The mentality some lads have about Kerry is akin to Dev and the Catholic Church back in the day . Soup takers .
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The cosseted show pony has beguiled the weak minded lads…they’re dithering between ryan tubridy love and david clifford love. Harmless fellas really
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I see #genuflectionjoe is trending on twitter
Limerick setback as injury rules English out of final and Hannon hopes remain in the balance
MICHAEL VERNEY
Limerick boss John Kiely may be forced to dig even deeper into his reserves for Sunday’s All-Ireland SHC final against Kilkenny with All-Star defender Richie English set to miss out from the match-day squad due to injury.
Kiely is already planning without four-time All-Star corner-back Seán Finn after a season-ending cruciate knee ligament injury suffered earlier this summer while captain, and centre-back, Declan Hannon is a major doubt after missing their All-Ireland semi-final victory over Galway with a knee injury.
English (above) is understood to have suffered an injury in training over the weekend and his expected absence cuts further into Kiely’s defensive options, given that the experienced Doon clubman has featured off the bench three times in this year’s championship.
English was sprung in their Munster SHC battles against Tipperary and Cork before also featuring in the final quarter of their provincial final win against Clare, and his absence is one which Kiely could do without given the lack of options in the full-back line.
Kilkenny boss Derek Lyng is also sweating over the fitness of key defender David Blanchfield with the towering Bennettsbridge clubman believed to have picked up a serious knock in their All-Ireland semi-final victory over Clare.
Interestingly, Limerick and Kilkenny will not be having their traditional post-match banquets in Dublin on Sunday night with rising hotel costs the chief reason for the two squads heading back home on the same day.
Colm Keys: Kerry and Dublin has a Federer-Nadal rivalry feel to it – you just keep getting drawn back in
Colm Keys
Yesterday at 20:23
The 20-year old Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz looks to be the one to finally break up the old cartel – Federer/Nadal/Djokovic – that has had such a grip on tennis Majors for so long.
It was good while it lasted – very good – and while the arrival of new blood is welcome, no one ever tired of a final in Roland Garros, Wimbledon, Flushing or the Rod Laver Centre in Melbourne that didn’t have two of them going hard at each other across the net.
The golfing order has changed too but a back nine Sunday in Augusta always crackled more when Tiger Woods was on the prowl at the same time as Phil Mickelson was conjuring magic.
The sporting public largely wanted them too, even at the expense of the novelty or romance that it sometimes threw up. The TV ratings reflected that.
With 60 minutes played in both All-Ireland semi-finals over the weekend, the spectre of a Derry-Monaghan final briefly and vaguely loomed, albeit not in parallel.
Novelty and romance in spades. The neutral would have relished such shock results in Croke Park.
But let’s face it, unless you are partisan, the outcome of a Dublin-Kerry All-Ireland final pleases everyone else because you know what you are going to get with them.
As often as they have come together for these big occasions, they have rarely, if ever, failed to deliver great moments, tension, and drama in the one package.
It is a safe bet.
Like them or loath them, and for both there are probably more in the second category even if they hold private admiration, it’s hard to dispute that they make the most compelling rivalry that you can’t just get tired of.
Both have their advantages in resource and football terms, for sure. There’s a reason why they top the All-Ireland roll of honour, the only two counties to push through the 30-mark with Kerry on 38 All-Ireland titles, Dublin with eight fewer.
And why they are, by some distance, the most common All-Ireland final pairing with from, albeit with large gaps between some of them. And yet 14 Dublin/Kerry finals seems small for the familiarity it prompts.
They first met in 1892 and then again in 1903. They had a mini series in 1923 and 1924 and went at again in the famous 1955 final, in what was the classic ‘City v Country’ battle as, for the first time, Dublin relied exclusively on home-grown talent.
The Kevin Heffernan-Mick O’Dwyer era brought six finals over a 12-year period before a break to the current run that has seen Dublin win the last three, 2011, 2015 and 2019.
The stakes were so high in 2019 as Dublin sought the five-in-a-row that had evaded Kerry 37 years earlier and even higher in the replay that produced a first half that was arguably a superior standard to anything that had gone before or since, though Sunday’s first half is a legitimate contender too.
Five players each scored four points from play on that Saturday evening four years ago, unprecedented as nothing was missed. The teams have not changed all that much since.
The similarities in how they got the job done against their respective opponents was striking and not unexpected over the weekend.
Kerry’s squeeze on Odhran Lynch’s kick-out as normal time closed out yielded three points to establish control. Dublin’s pressure on Rory Beggan and then Stephen O’Hanlon to produce that free for Paul Mannion to land came during a spell of high intensity from Dublin.
Instinctively, they both knew when the moment had arrived to go for the game, to seize it.
The crowd and their opponents know what’s happening too, that the ‘kill’ is on.
They hit harder too – but with the exception of a few notable periods over the years, that has always been the case. It’s just been disguised well. And that’s something Derry will take with them from 2023, having played Dublin in the Division 2 league final earlier in the season too.
There is much to provide extra edge to both beyond the accepted motivation to win an All-Ireland title that these players would have had as a goal at the outset.
The noise of wagons circling in the Dublin camp has been through the roof since first Mannion and Jack McCaffrey and then Stephen Cluxton made clear their intentions to return to the panel.
Dublin will always be measured by the weight of their six-in-a-row but will they be a group of players that recovered to win another All-Ireland title after the wobbles of the last two years?
Can they pick themselves up to win again after they had lost their way a little, just as the great Kerry team of the 1970s and 1980s did in 1984, and again in 1985 and 1986?
They may see this as the ultimate measure of themselves, even though they haven’t been miles away in the last two seasons which makes their next All-Ireland title their most important.
And it’s as if Kerry are leveraging last year’s work on this All-Ireland too. That they’ve had to put it all back in the pot to double up, now that Cluxton, McCaffrey and Mannion are back and Con O’Callaghan, who missed the 2022 semi-final, will be playing too.
Kerry never beat a fully stacked Dublin through the last decade and even now it’s probably not the same Dublin team. But in 12 days’ time there’ll still be enough elements in place to draw a very strong connection.
On these pages last Saturday, Philly McMahon referenced a story he had heard from another county about a veteran player who had urged his colleagues to “get me up the steps,” a rallying call clearly made in his capacity as captain.
McMahon suggested he nearly “cracked a rib” he cringed so hard at the thought of it, suggesting it wouldn’t be a factor in a Dublin dressing-room.
Maybe so. But it’s hard to imagine too that such a sentiment would not exist in some way towards James McCarthy or David Clifford in a Dublin or Kerry dressing-room these weeks for what they have done for their counties in different ways and in different timespans.
There may not be the sense of occasion around Kerry or Dublin that would exist in any of the other counties if they had an All-Ireland build-up ahead.
That shouldn’t take away from the sense of anticipation around this game, not for the nostalgia or for anything that went before but finals are about sorting out the best from the better.
Sir Cliff has made his decision
Stand tickets trading for four figures already
I just won 2 tickets to An Classico 
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I won’t be there anyway !!
He’d some cameo in the semi final. Blazed a few wides & gave the ball away another couple of times. Unless it was a completely different player.
He hit the post anyway not sure on blazing wides
Very hard to see headquarters handing two matches in a row to kerry. Dublin will win this by 6 points
Be like finding out Declan Quill or Ian Twiss was injured
No nonsense McCarthy as driven as ever
Wednesday 26 July 2023
By John Harrington
James McCarthy says it takes him a bit longer than it once did “to get the oil going through the joints”, but you wouldn’t think it.
33 years of age and in his 13th championship campaign with Dublin, he’s still playing at such an elevated level that he’s a realistic contender for Footballer of the Year.
Former team-mates and opponents alike have been tripping over one another in recent weeks to laud McCarthy as one of the greatest to ever play the game, but it comes as no shock to hear the man himself couldn’t give a damn about the platitudes.
Off the pitch McCarthy is the same sort of personality as he is on it. No faff, no fluff, a straight-talker who doesn’t varnish his opinions for the sake of a layer of gloss.
He knows a narrative around this match is that he’s one of three Dublin players who can become make history by winning a ninth All-Ireland medal, but that’s not something that’s occupied his own thoughts ahead of the game.
“I don’t complicate things in my mind,” says McCarthy. “I’m pretty simple in how I go into games. I get myself in the best condition I can, focus on two or three things defensively and offensively and generally speaking it kind of helps you to perform as best you can.
“That stuff is dangling out in the air and people like to talk about it but I try to keep away from it as much as I can. A few weeks ago people were trying to retire you so things can change very quickly. If you hang your hat on that stuff it’s not going to serve you well.
“Look, obviously you hear it out there…but I’ll get more satisfaction getting Lee Gannon and these guys a taste of it and see how it feels to play on a big day and stuff. I think that’s more important. All you want to do is win the All-Ireland and we have a massive game against Kerry, that’s the focus.
“In 10 years time I’ll be sitting in the Autobahn having a pint and I might reflect back on that stuff. But it’s not something you hang your hat on because things can change very quickly.”
McCarthy is speaking from experience. After winning six All-Irelands in a row from 2015 to 2020, Dublin failed to make it past the semi-finals in 2021 and 2022.
A common narrative in those two seasons was that a once great team had slipped a rung or two, and that mainstays of the team like McCarthy himself were no longer at the peak of their powers.
Did he have any doubts himself about his ability to maintain the personal standards he had set throughout his career?
“You’re only human, of course you think about it,” admits McCarthy with typical candour.
“Yeah, you have to reflect. You’re never the complete player. You can always get better at something, particularly probably more the '21 semi-final, that was very disappointing with how I performed that day.
“You reflect and you think and you go, ‘That’s not going to happen again’, with a few things, or maybe you get better at certain things. You have to be like that all the time if you want to be playing at the highest level.
“Yeah, you’d always be trying to chip away at things, trying to get better. Even last weekend (against Monaghan), gave away a few frees, missed a few shots and stuff like that. There’s always things you can improve on.”
McCarthy’s record for Dublin in All-Ireland Finals is, frankly, ridiculous.
He’s played eight and won eight, as have both Stephen Cluxton and Mick Fitzsimons.
What qualities have made Dublin an unbeatable All-Ireland Final team throughout his career?
“It’s a good question,” says McCarthy. “Like, '11, there’s probably a take on '11 that we robbed that game or stole that game. I never bought into that, I thought we had the better of that game for long periods.
“We were obviously playing a really strong Kerry team back then and they obviously kicked into a really strong position, but they didn’t finish us off. They left us in the game and obviously Kevin Mac had a great goal.
“Obviously winning your first All-Ireland gives you a lot of belief and we just kept building from there. It was a perfect storm between all the younger players coming through, good management, and stuff like that, so we kind of just rolled with it. It’s hard to think it’s that long ago now. It’s just gone by in a blast.
“It’s hard to know…the margins have been fine because we went to replays and won games by a point. It’s very hard to capture what it is. It’s about having belief in yourself and at the right times in games to go for it and go for it hard.
“I think we’ve been good at that, we’ve had different guys over the years who have been good at that. You’re not always relying on the same guy which is a big string to our team.”
James McCarthy, Dublin, in action against Declan O’Sullivan, Kerry, in the 2011 All-Ireland SFC Final.
James McCarthy, Dublin, in action against Declan O’Sullivan, Kerry, in the 2011 All-Ireland SFC Final.
It’s hardly a surprise that this All-Ireland Final is being billed as a last dance scenario for a generation of Dublin footballers.
Stephen Cluxton, Jack McCaffrey, and Paul Mannion have returned to the fold, and then there’s also the trio of players aiming to make history by winning a ninth All-Ireland medal.
Those of a sentimental persuasion will view this All-Ireland Final against Kerry as the perfect opportunity for someone like McCarthy to write a fitting final chapter to his inter-county story, just don’t expect that narrative to make the man himself dewy-eyed.
“I suppose I can see how it looks like that maybe from the outside with the guys coming back in and stuff, but, no, I don’t think we ever looked at it like that,” he says.
“Obviously there are a few of us that have less years ahead of us than behind us, but if you ask Mick Fitz and myself we’re still really enjoying our football. You take each season on it’s merit so, no, I don’t think it’s a Michael Jordan type thing where it’s our last dance, there’s no talk of that anyway, that’s for sure.
To be honest with you, it’s gone by fast, it’s just so scary how the years flash by. Obviously starting off you have your ambitions and you have your goals but realistically you wouldn’t have seen it going the way it went, no, you don’t see yourself playing that long and stuff like that.
“I’d take a bit of pride in myself as well, I still want to play at this level and I’m still competing at a high level.
“You’ll be finishing playing for a long time as well so if you can get the most out of yourself that you can, that’s it really.”
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It’s all set up for Gough to decide it with some controversial decision . Chalk it down .
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