Kieran Shannon: Why isn’t David Clifford up for Player of the Year? Fossa Freak is real MVP
David Clifford celebrates a Paul Geaney goal against Cork. Photo by Eóin Noonan/Sportsfile
Sometimes in football as in life people can try too hard to be clever, or at least to be perceived as clever. We want to be viewed as more discerning than the crowd. We, I, see things that you don’t. And so in wanting to look beyond the obvious, we can overlook it.
Which leaves us with a situation whereby David Clifford won’t be the Footballer of the Year for 2021.
It may be patently clear to everyone in the country that the Kerryman is the best footballer in Ireland right now and that he underlined that fact with his performance levels throughout 2021. But he won’t be this year’s winner. He isn’t even one of the three nominees.
At a meeting in Dublin last week the All-Star selectors decided to shortlist Lee Keegan from Mayo and a couple of fine footballers from Tyrone called Conor Meyler and Kieran McGeary.
Now, to be fair to everyone involved, we can see why those same selectors nominated that trio for All-Stars and almost certainly will include all of them on their best XV when it’s chosen in early December.
Keegan is not only the best footballer Mayo has produced and the best footballer in history to go without winning an All-Ireland (to date); he probably is, to borrow a term of the late great John Morrison’s, the best 360° footballer to ever play in any backline. No other player with a number less than eight on his back has scored more during their championship career as Keegan has, while if you’re of the old school that a defender’s primary job is to defend, well then he’s your man on that count too. Over the years he’s shut down everyone from Seán Cavanagh to Diarmuid Connolly and Michael Murphy and this year he added Shane Walsh and Con O’Callaghan to his scalp list.
Meyler and McGeary, meanwhile, were vital cogs in the Tyrone machine that churned out an unlikely though deserving All-Ireland.
But with respect to them, while they may have played and won on the final day of the football year, neither of them are a David Clifford and neither adorned the footballing year like David Clifford did.
Seeing as a season is supposed to be as much a journey as it is a destination, we’ll take you back to the start of it.
It all tipped off back on May 15, its opening game being a Division 1 South clash between Kerry and Galway. Within a minute of the first water break Clifford had already scored two goals. By the end of the game he had racked up 3-6 of which only a point came from a free. Before most teams — including a punch-drunk Galway — had barely kicked a ball, both Clifford and his team had set the tone and the key narrative for the year which held true for all but the last fortnight of it: it was going to take a force of nature to deny him and them in 2021.
Eight days later in the most attractive game of that weekend, he kicked five points from play as well as slotting away a penalty to inspire a seven-point comeback against the Dubs in Thurles.
His scorched-earth policy continued right through June and into July. Against Roscommon he tomahawked a goal to finish on 1-4. The next day out he went for 1-6 as Kerry pummelled Tyrone in Killarney. At the same venue a fortnight later he took Clare for 1-6 in the opening round of the Munster championship. Kerry weren’t quite as rampant the next day out against Tipperary as David Power’s side escaped with ‘only’ an 11-point beating, but even that evening provided an abiding memory with Clifford rifling a ball to the top corner of the Tipp net.
It was the sixth consecutive competitive match in which he’d scored at least a goal, the kind of run we suspect — but with the GAA’s lack of a proper statistical database, can’t confirm — is unprecedented in the history of the sport.
True, after that, the goals dried up. Against Cork in the Munster final he didn’t even register a point from play, his one solitary score coming from a free. But there’s hardly any shame in being held scoreless by Seán Meehan who could finish the decade as the best all-round back in the game south of the Dublin-Mayo axis. And it wasn’t as if it mattered. Kerry won easily.
Besides, he atoned for it. Because the next game he and Kerry played definitively proved who the best footballer of 2021 was.
While it was the one day in the year Kerry malfunctioned, Clifford didn’t. He was imperious, keeping them in the game to bring it into extra time by virtue of eight points he kicked, only three of which were from frees.
Except he was unable to play in extra-time. Injury ruled him, and Kerry subsequently — consequently — lost. By a point.
That was the All-Ireland right there. That day, that game, that period of extra time ultimately decided the destination of Sam Maguire in 2021. And as it turns out, very likely the Footballer of the Year shortlist as well.
In America, they have a different title for such an award. They call it the Most Valuable Player. And synonymous with those three letters is the word ‘race’. As in just 15 games into a marathon 82-game regular-season, NBA fans and pundits will be ranking and speculating about who is where in the MVP race.
The nature of a GAA season means its eventual winner may be a bolter rather than a frontrunner and not even a household name. Ja Fallon wasn’t really known outside Connacht at the outset of 1998. But going with a McGeary or a Meyler in a year when Clifford played the football he did is a stretch.
Sure, there is more to football than scoring. Throughout the summer Meyler, nominally a wing forward, hammered the hammer, curbing some of the best attacking backs in the game: Ryan McHugh, Ryan McAnespie, Paudie Clifford, Paddy Durcan. McGeary is one of the best middle-eight players in the game, something his semi-final display against Kerry perfectly illustrated. A brilliant stat-attack by journalist Maurice Brosnan showed that McGeary had a remarkable 40 possessions that day, committed no turnover, caused the opposition to commit six, and either assisted on or was fouled for five of Tyrone’s scores that day.
But that same day he also kicked three wides and not a single score (although to be fair, he finished the year with 0-11 from eight games). Meyler didn’t score that day either. In fact over the championship Meyler scored just a single point, and over the year just 0-4.
During this year’s league alone Clifford put up 6-22, averaging 1-4 from play alone. You might say it was ‘only the league’, but all those games were against Division One teams, Tyrone included, while it had even greater credence for its proximity to the championship in a condensed season, a point Tyrone themselves have acknowledged in their explanation of their vaccine ‘conundrum’.
Combine that with his championship output and he racked up 8-39, an average of 1-5 per game, or 4.87 from play.
So, yeah, he was held against Cork — but that’s a bit like saying Bernard Brogan shouldn’t have been the 2010 footballer of the year because he went scoreless from play in a last-12 game against Louth.
And yeah, he didn’t play in the final game of the year. But that didn’t stop Brogan rightly winning in 2010. And probably the biggest reason why Clifford didn’t get to play into September this year was because he was unavailable to play in extra-time in the semi-final. His absence for that last 20 minutes underlined, not diminished, his MVP case.
In doing so, it diminishes the honour itself which already is the poorer for Colm Cooper not being among its past winners (it was the Texaco award, a scheme now extinct, that Gooch won in 2004). People pay to watch David Clifford. Like Cooper, he’ll be a player we’ll tell our grandchildren that we saw, including in 2021. Outside of Tyrone, who will say the same about McGeary and Meyler for all their virtues?
If it wasn’t for Jrue Holiday, Team USA would not be Olympic champions, just as the Milwaukee Bucks would not be current NBA champions. His defence, and assists, and decent scoring power (17.7 ppg) were key to those wins. But even the most nerdish of analytics would claim that he was either team’s or competition’s MVP when that was evidently superstars Kevin Durant and the Athens-reared Giannis Antetokounmpo, widely known as the Greek Freak.
So it is with football. Don’t overcomplicate it or exaggerate matters. McGeary and Meyler are deserving All Ireland winners and All Stars but the real MVP is the Fossa Freak.
