All Ireland Football Final - An Classico

He’s also a goalie, he knows he’s not really a footballer

Lazy, he was a raw 20 year old. Coming up against the greatest team ever. He gave the dubs a lesson last year along with O Shea, so much so the dubs had to desperately fork back out a few of the retired lads.

1 Like

Dubs have an open door policy, they know lads have other interests outside of GAA. So they can come and go .A remarkable bunch all told.

That looked like a pitiful Dublin media night tonight.

It’s just not right cc @peddlerscross.

1 Like

Utterly grim.

I suppose dublin should win, since they’re in the final on merit. I’d watch it if i thought there was a reasonable chance of the kerry keeper and/or clifford being stretchered off.

1 Like

He didn’t . He dived for the match winning free . O Shea should not have been on pitch to
Take it as should have got red for kicking dubs keeper in the face after peno . You could make a strong argument that dubs should be on course for 10 in a row with Mayo keeper getting two bites at the cherry to score free for no clear reason the year before .

1 Like

Sure if the dubs won in 2009, 2010, 2012 and 2014 as well they could be on for 15 in a row.

1 Like

Mayo Joe done them in 2012. It’s why the black card was brought in but the other years were fair and square as far as I recall

1 Like

Its an old story, oft repeated. The kerry boys have built a reputation on bating a hurling county in a munster final. They’ve relied on a sense of entitlement, awestruck referees and cowardice ever since.

1 Like

Give it a rest ffs.

2 Likes

The Cliff has well and truly gone and mentally destroyed a full county.

2 Likes

The mentality some lads have about Kerry is akin to Dev and the Catholic Church back in the day . Soup takers .

1 Like

The cosseted show pony has beguiled the weak minded lads…they’re dithering between ryan tubridy love and david clifford love. Harmless fellas really

1 Like

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 :grin::grin::grin:

3 Likes