Why Dubs will tick another box tonight

KERRY football followers aren’t sure what to make of this year’s Allianz Football League.

This week in the county, local newspapers carried pictures of a seriously fit Tommy Walsh in action during St Kilda’s NAB Cup game against Brisbane Lions in Melbourne. The pictures served as a powerful reminder to all Kerry followers of the native game what they’ve been missing since September 2009. And yet, having watched wistfully as Walsh makes his mark down under, there is a quiet satisfaction within the supporter ranks because of the way Walsh’s former colleagues in the green and gold have gone about their business since the start of this year.

When the McGrath Cup campaign began just seven weeks ago, Kerry were officially a team in transition and the received wisdom was that Jack O’Connor was taking on the challenge of his managerial career in overseeing that transition. Five games later and apart being turned over by Cork in Tralee, the evolution of this group of players continues without any major upheaval. Maybe all this talk of rebuilding, of radical surgery and of a dearth of genuine quality emerging from the ranks was a smokescreen. Or maybe in the games to date, supporters have been seeing what they wanted to see, bending the evidence to suit what we want to make of it and interpreting performances and results in January and February as being somehow important in the greater scheme of things.