Don’t expect Dublin v Kerry to be pretty

Give or take a day, it was July 23, 2014 when Jim McGuinness put the finishing touches to his successful plan to beat Dublin. Having managed to run the gauntlet of Ulster, he couldn’t have afforded to scheme any earlier.

“I wasn’t fully sure we were even going to meet them because we had a quarter-final and whatever else to play,” he said in his autobiography Until Victory Always, released last year. “But I knew that if we hoped to beat them, we needed to plan for it well in advance.”

Should Kerry repeat that trick – and by God it would be a trick – November 20, 2015 may go down as the date Éamonn Fitzmaurice began to plot in the likelihood they would face Dublin. That was the day the GAA’s master fixtures were released. Fitzmaurice being Fitzmaurice, he would have realised shortly after losing last year’s All-Ireland final that the Munster champions were due to play the Leinster victors in 2016. But the announcement of the 2016 fixtures schedule gave him a date: August 28. It might as well have been tattooed into his skin.