Dublin’s time – but Kerry have been here before
The two finals against Mayo were so alike, ditto the two against Tyrone, while the bottom line in the two showdowns against Cork in 07 and 09 was the same as well.
Last Sunday the 2002 final defeat to Armagh finally got paired off. Swap the blue jerseys for orange ones and you’d nearly be looking at the same game.
The scoreline was virtually identical.
Again Kerry were beaten by a point, by a team that scored 1-12.
Again Kerry had been four points up and cruising.
Again it all turned on a goal: the ‘Oisín McManamon Factor’ if you will.
And again it was a goal which Kerry will wonder how they didn’t prevent, by either fair means or foul. Just as Darragh Ó Sé still can’t understand why he didn’t take out either Paul McGrane or Oisín McConville in the lead up to that 2002 strike, Declan O’Sullivan will lose a good bit of sleep figuring out why he didn’t just haul Kevin McManamon down.
The two refereeing performances were eerily alike as well. John Bannon should have added on at least another three minutes back in 2002 and likewise last Sunday Joe McQuillan wrongly deprived Kerry the time and chance to carve out an equaliser.
From McManamon winning that dubious free off Barry John Keane to Stephen Cluxton striking that free, exactly 60 seconds expired. In the Connacht final, Michael Collins pulled Mayo’s Cillian O’Connor up for taking more than 30 seconds over a dead ball. After the Dublin-Donegal game last month, Mickey Harte rightly noted that there should be some regulation brought in to either acknowledge or curb the time it takes for goalkeepers to come upfield to take scoreable frees.
In the interim, McQuillan should at least have added another half-minute to proceedings but he didn’t. He made a string of other howlers. Just one that has gone totally unnoticed: in the 67th minute with the teams level, the unfortunate Keane turned the ball over with that man McManamon again bursting onto the break before hopping the ball twice. A six-year-old could tell you, that’s a free. Had McQuillan implemented that basic rule, Bryan Sheehan would have been lining up a ball on the Dublin 45 to almost certainly put Kerry 1-11 to 1-10 ahead. Instead Dublin went upfield, setting in motion a drive that would result in Bernard Brogan putting Dublin ahead by that scoreline. But the thing is, you need those breaks, Dublin deserved those breaks, Kerry have got their share of them before.
When Maurice Fitzgerald slotted over that free against Armagh in 2000 to earn his side a replay, was it a free?
That year Armagh didn’t get the breaks; in 2002 they did while Dublin didn’t, Ray Cosgrove’s shot coming back off that upright. In 2006 Dublin should have had time to equalise against Mayo but didn’t get it; this year, they were the beneficiaries of such dodgy timekeeping. The trick is to keep coming back, keep getting back up there, and some year luck and everything else you’ve earned sways it your way.
For the last 10 years football has been blessed with two exceptionally talented teams in Kerry and Tyrone and it’s taken a particularly special effort from teams with a particular profile to deny either of them Sam Maguire.
Armagh 2002, Cork 2010 and Dublin 2011 were all sufficiently emboldened from previous provincial success and sufficiently scarred from other big-time defeats to go all the way. Armagh lived in the gym and went to La Manga. Cork went to Bere Island. This year Dublin have been working out at least once every week at six in the morning.
You can only do that for so long. You can’t eat grass for a decade, no one can. That’s the trade-off; the brilliance of Kerry has been to sustain the level just below that, which is why they’ve won so much and why they’ve lost some big ones as well.
This campaign copper-fastened their greatness, not marred it; Kieran Donaghy’s ‘cometh the hour’ performance last Sunday in particular was a mark of the man. There is at least another All-Ireland in that forward line when you consider Colm Cooper at 28 is its oldest starting member. But whatever about the backs they don’t have the bench or the bodies like they had only two years ago; Kerry lost this final as much because they hadn’t war horses like Tommy Griffin and Seamus Scanlon to call upon as much as they hadn’t an institution like Darragh Ó Sé.
Dublin and Cork have won the past two All-Irelands, in truth because they not only grew wiser and better but because they stuck around to see Kerry and Tyrone grow older too.
As long as Jack O’Connor and Mickey Harte are around, Cork and Dublin will be prevented from forming a little duopoly of their own, but the days of Kerry and Tyrone’s own little duopoly are well and truly gone.
* Contact: kieranshannon@eircom.net
