Shadow boxing time over for Kerry as they knuckle down to real business

Perched on a treatment bed, in a small physio’s room at the end of a short corridor in Austin Stack Park, Jack O’Connor answered questions about Kerry’s first league game: a one-point defeat to Derry. Given this turn of events, O’Connor was asked if he would disturb the Clifford brothers from their winter hibernation. Outside, a chilling wind had been joined by rain, for nuisance. There were four days left in January. In the league, importance is not a matter of mutual consent. Everyone invents their own significance. Derry fielded 14 of the players who had eyeballed Kerry in a titanic All-Ireland semi-final six months earlier and Kerry sent out a team that reeked of the McGrath Cup. The off-the-peg assertion was that Derry had “laid down a marker,” but off-the-peg assertions are a genetically modified alternative to critical thinking and the league is partial to that diet. Derry’s “marker” dissolved like chalk. Their season went all Hollywood and then it went all EastEnders. Kerry lost by 10 points to Dublin at the end of February and retreated into a silhouette. They booked a warm-weather training camp in Portugal for the same week as the league final, content that there wouldn’t be a clash. Since the Dublin game four months ago, though, they are the only unbeaten team in the country: three league wins followed by five wins in what is loosely called ‘the championship’. They have reached Croke Park at the end of June without leaving a trace, unstressed. In ice-skating, marks are awarded according to the difficulty of the routine attempted; those marks were not available to Kerry. They won the least competitive of all provincial championships and finished top of the most lopsided round robin group. The only way they could have made a wave in the championship was by losing. “The Kerry lads will be saying in the media, ‘We’ve been tuned in, we’ve been focused,’ but they’re going into games knowing you’re going to win them in second gear,” says Darren O’Sullivan, the former Kerry player and Newstalk analyst. “You’re not really at the races. You’re probably not as tight as you can be. You’re probably not running backwards as hard as you probably should at times. It’s just human nature. “Most of the games have been boring to watch and you’re kind of forcing yourself to watch them. You have these teams fighting tooth and nail to be in the All-Ireland [round robin] series and then when they get there they’re trying not to get beaten by 15 points. The games were torture to watch.” Kerry have won their five championship games so far by an average of 10 points. Can any patterns be deduced? They have deepened their roster of scorers and consciously spread the load. Tom O’Sullivan, their marauding corner back, has been a regular scorer for years, but this year his 10 points from play is equal to Seanie O’Shea. From numbers two to nine they have generated more threat. “Look at the goal against Louth that Tadhg Morley [Kerry defender] scored and look at the goal that Diarmuid O’Connor scored,” says Sylvester Hennessy, a former analyst with the Kerry team and sports editor of Kerry’s Eye. “For O’Connor’s goal, Jason Foley had the shot that was saved – so the full back turned up in the full forward position. For Morley’s goal [his first in the championship] he linked up with Seanie O’Shea right on top of the goal.” A couple of debilitating trends have hung around in Kerry’s system, though, like a low blood count. There was a spike in David Clifford’s output against Meath when he clocked up 2-1 from play, but his overall numbers have been down. Not alarmingly. Last year, he accounted for more than a fifth of Kerry’s total from play in the championship; this year it’s about a sixth. When his scores from play and dead balls are collated his percentage of Kerry’s total is steady away at about 75%. His performances, though, have not been sparkling or explosive. Until the last two games in the round robin series, Kerry were on a run of just two goals in seven matches. By the beginning of June Colm Keys pointed out that Con O’Callaghan had scored as many goals this season than the Kerry players had mustered between them. Was that a fault in their hard drive or could it be fixed by turning the computer on and off? In last year’s championship they had scored 11 goals in their first five games; this year, that total had collapsed to four. “You can say they’re taking the pressure off Clifford,” says Dara Ó Cinnéide, the former Kerry captain and broadcaster, “but I would say they will be demanding a certain amount off