Tony Leen: If there is a Kerry way to win an All-Ireland, this was it
Kerry's David Clifford with the Sam Maguire cup after their GAA Football All-Ireland Senior Championship final against Donegal at Croke Park on Sunday. Picture: Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile
If it is to be Jack O’Connor’s final All-Ireland final sideline in Kerry colours, what sort of an exclamation point is this to put on a remarkable coaching stint for his county?
His namesake might have been the last thing on Joe O’Connor’s mind as he thundered towards Hill 16 in the last minute to burst the Donegal net, but it was the mic drop moment of the football season. The coup de grace.
On the sideline, Jack O’Connor’s pretence collapsed, he leapt into the arms of his mentors and confreres, finally discharged from a year when the rock kept rolling back down the hill on him. From losing his entire management team in the winter recess to his starting midfield in the spring and early summer, 2025 was no midnight run. And all the sweeter for that.
Aren’t those ones always?
Kerry’s 39th title puts O’Connor’s five as senior manager third in the all-time list of All-Ireland winning football bosses after Mick O’Dwyer and Jim Gavin. He first marshalled a title at senior level in 2004, but his Under 21 reign produced an All-Ireland six years before that. His wife Bridie took a snap of him leaving the house last Thursday night with his gear, reckoning he might need it for posterity.
We shall see. His bean an tí, as O’Connor labels her, might like him around to cut the grass a bit more but there will be no-one in Austin Stack Park’s pavilion keen to see the back of Jack. Not least when the next two obvious candidates in former All-Ireland-winning managers Eamonn Fitzmaurice and Pat O’Shea have shown little by way of inclination to jump back into the fire. Jack will laugh quietly at the irony of it all.
Could he really walk away from it all after this? Is it the perfect moment to sail off or does he have more in the tank? He told those in his footballing circle that this was a one-year deal, so perhaps his mind has long since been made up, but the feeling of sipping a cold beer in the dressing room afterwards with his players is one that will sustain him well beyond the winter. That he is a retired schoolteacher will give him pause for thought too, as beautiful and all as looking out onto St Finian’s Bay in Ballinskelligs may be.
What he will delight more in is recollection of Sunday’s precision performance on the biggest day of them all. His coaching team, led by Cian O’Neill with important add-ins from Pa McCarthy, James Costello and Aodan MacGearailt, devised a strategy to disrupt Donegal’s zone defence through tempo, the positioning of David Clifford on the right flank and the offensive push that created the pockets for Paudie Clifford to prosper. In passing, it has to be asked why Jim McGuinness’ men continued to be passive in their set defence in the second half, and how Paudie Clifford was allowed get on so much unmolested ball? Is there another Kerry playmaker an opposition would less like to be in control of the baton?
However, the Donegal inquisition must wait. This was Kerry’s classic Sunday. There weren’t just moments, there were stages, in the first quarter when they were touching the stars with their rhythms. Tempo is the most under-rated virtue in field sport, and Kerry owned the clock and the mood of the final for the first 20. Donegal came within four points at one point in the second half, but the game intelligence from Kerry to slow the play, to quicken it again, to extricate themselves from traps as they did brilliantly in the 42nd minute to create to space and point for Paudie Clifford (with a tasty basketball tip down from Mark O’Shea) was the stuff of coaching conferences.
When the occasions demanded it, Kerry were a model of efficiency. Paudie Clifford, Gavin White and Sean O’Shea were masterful in controlling the ball and the clock. In recalling their defeat to Meath in Tullamore, Jack O’Connor again referenced the fact that Sean O’Shea, Kerry’s conductor and leader, was absent.
“Today is not a good day for us, and what we wanted to achieve,” admitted a gracious Donegal boss Jim McGuinness afterwards. “I said to the players after it’s not a game they should think about for a long time. They’ve got to let this one go.
“We didn’t perform, Kerry did perform, that’s the bottom line. We were struggling to deal with them in the early stages. We did a lot of preparatory work in terms of managing David Clifford, but it does take more than one person. We made too many mistakes, did things we don’t normally do. And we had too many turnovers, that’s the bottom line.
“Kerry played the football today. You have to tip your hat to them, they played brilliantly for long stages of that game. They came hard early, Gavin White was picking up a lot of ball.”
Within six minutes of the start, captain White had two points and an assist. Kerry didn’t kick waywardly for the first ten minutes and all four of their wides in the first half were for two-point efforts. David Clifford didn’t touch the ball for the first six minutes. Think about that. There may not have been another man in Ireland with more personal pressure on his shoulders than the 26-year-old, but when he spoke to his manager Thursday about handling that, he betrayed no sense of a man who sensed the walls closing in. He’d win his ball and act as provider. Don’t worry. The moments would come. They did.
All-Ireland finals aren’t won with pure artistry, though. Graft is stirred into the craft. Around the central third Mark O’Shea was doing all the quarrying of a man cast from an occasional extra into the role of a Hollywood leading man, guiding, controlling with a flick here and a breakdown there. Invariably, it was Mike Breen, Brian Ó Beaglaoich or Gavin White who emerged from the ruck with possession. Anything aerial to the flanks was being hoovered up by the remarkable Joe O’Connor. Sean O’Brien kicked two first-half points. He might have had more in the second had he been better supplied, in splendid isolation, in the pocket.
This was the Donegal dilemma and as fine a coaching mind as McGuinness is, they never got the depth of their defence right. Not nearly. Kerry’s facility to keep them at arm’s length on the pitch and on the scoreboard was death by 26 cuts.
Donegal did immensely well to arrest that momentum and by the 54th minute, Michael Murphy’s free had them only four in arrears, 0-22 to 0-18. Earlier they had also cut a yawning 0-13 to 0-4 with four points on the bounce.
But David Clifford, remarkably for his limited involvement, jogged off at half time with 0-7 to his name, the last two-pointer on the buzzer a painful job for the Donegal dressing room.
“We got close enough, four points in it at one stage,” rued McGuinness, “but then we had three wides in a row. That energy starts to disappear. I got the sense that our fans were there waiting for us to catch fire.”
This has been a season of renewal for Kerry’s relationship with their support. Perhaps it changed when David Clifford appealed to them directly after the preliminary quarter-final win over Cavan in Killarney, but definitely, something has changed in the dynamic from the stands and terraces. By the three-quarter stage at Croke Park, Kerry’s faithful put down their programmes, stood up and chorused. Ker-ry. Ker-ry. In the 64th minute, the favourite son danced inside and clipped over his ninth point of the day. It was easy to lipread the support. There is a way to win an All-Ireland.
And this is it.
