Kieran Shannon: Players change but Kerry's league song remains the same
Joe O'Connor of Kerry poses for a selfie after signing autographs for young supporters after the Allianz Football League Division 1 match between Armagh and Kerry at BOX-IT Athletic Grounds in Armagh. Photo by Ray McManus/Sportsfile
When it comes to deciding who the greatest Gaelic football team ever is, a couple of tiebreakers tend to sway it Dublin’s way over Micko’s team of all talents.
The most common one is that Jim Gavin’s crew managed to complete the five in a row. And that to end the argument, the core of his team remained on after he himself departed to make it six All-Irelands on the trot. By any calculation six trumps four.
Of course there’s a counterargument to that. If Seamus Darby never scored that goal, would so many of that Kerry team still have had the appetite to go again and win further All-Irelands in the mid-80s?
O’Dwyer himself doubted it. As much as a part of him would always be haunted by ’82, he was philosophical enough by 1990 to write in his autobiography with Owen McCrohan, “It was best for the Kerry players who were drinking too much that they did not [win the five in a row]. In the end, I suppose everything evened itself out.”
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To string together another three-in-a-row on top of previously doing a four-in-a-row was an even finer accomplishment and measure of their greatness than had they ‘only’ won the five-in-a-row.
Dublin supporters could meet that and raise Kerry one again – literally.
In the pictures section of Páidí Ó Sé’s 2001 autobiography, there is a photo from the Kerry training ground with Pat Spillane, Ó Sé himself, Ogie Moran, Ger Power and Mikey Sheehy all facing the camera as the sun is fading on both Killarney and their careers. The caption reads, ‘The Gang of Five. Eight (All-Ireland) medals each. A feat unlikely to be matched again.’
But it was. Overtaken even. After defeating Kerry in the 2023 final, Stephen Cluxton, James McCarthy and Michael Fitzsimmons formed an exclusive 999 club. Now there’s a feat that is unlikely to be matched again.
O’Dwyer himself pointed out in the middle of Dublin’s gold rush that they had yet to convincingly win an All-Ireland final, a hallmark for any claim to be great, or at least the greatest. Yet at the end of their run Dublin had won their nine All-Ireland finals by just a cumulative 20 points (and that didn’t include the drawn finals of 2016 and 2019). O’Dwyer’s won their eight finals by a combined 60 points. Dublin shaded finals. Kerry bossed them.
There is something though misleading about that criteria. If you take the league into account Dublin dominated from one end of a year to the other in a way Kerry never did.
O’Dwyer, possibly due to inheriting a team that had won four straight leagues but only the one Munster title, was notoriously lukewarm, suspicious even, when it came to the league. Gavin fully embraced and attacked it. In his first four years over the team, Dublin won every Division 1 title on offer. When his team lost the 2017 final to Kerry by a point, he’d later (unconvincingly) equate it to the pain Mayo would have felt losing that year’s All-Ireland final by a similar margin to his own team – and then he duly won the title back at the first opportunity in 2018.
If with a gun to its head this column had to decide between version 1A or 1B of Gaelic football’s GOAT debate, that is the tiebreaker: Dublin under Gavin won five leagues in seven years. Kerry won only three leagues on O’Dwyer’s 15-year watch.
Ironically though the league is about as fine a gauge as any of Kerry’s astonishing – unprecedented – consistency over the last 30 years – and the exceptional record of their most successful – whatever about most significant – manager over that period.
Next Sunday will see their nearest and dearest neighbours Cork share the same bill in Croke Park as them. T he last time Cork appeared in a Division 2 final, steamrolling Séamus McEnaney’s Monaghan, Kerry were also playing in the main event, again against Ulster opposition (Derry on that occasion), and again with Jack O’Connor at the helm.
Kerry won that 2009 Division 1 final, their third under O’Connor, just like they would win their third All-Ireland under him that September by edging Cork in the final. Thereafter we would witness two of the most dominant teams in the history of the national football league. Conor Counihan’s Cork would follow up their 2009 Division 2 title by winning three Division 1 titles in a row. Then along came Gavin’s Dublin.
Only one other team has won more consecutive leagues: the origin of the phrase ‘Mayo, God help us’ hails from the prospect of facing that county in the midst of the six straight leagues they won from 1934 to 1939.
A couple of other sides have managed to win four in a row. Gavin’s side of 2013 to 2016. The unwanted Kerry four-in-a-row of 1971 to 1974, and the more championship-successful unit that represented the county from 1928 to 1932 (there was no league in 1930).
Counihan’s Cork are the only side to win three leagues in a row and leave it at that.
Then there are only a handful of other teams who managed to put back-to-back league titles together: Derry 1995-96. Tyrone 2002-2003. And a feat that is often overlooked because Covid prevented them from getting to play in any finals, the Peter Keane Kerry team of 2020 and 2021 (sharing the latter of those titles with Dublin).
That’s it. In a competition that this year is celebrating its centenary, the national football league has had only eight teams that have won two or more leagues in consecutive years.
This Sunday Jack O’Connor’s Kerry, or at least its latest version, can make that nine.
O’Connor, for all his achievements, has yet to win back-to-back All-Irelands, not least because he has yet to win back-to-back leagues: famously, how his spring ends tends to determine how his summer fares as well.
This year though could see him joining Gavin on six All-Irelands won as a manager, trailing only O’Dwyer. And should he again outwit Jim McGuinness in a national decider on Sunday, he’ll have secured the tie-breaker over Gavin, having moved on to six league titles.
Kerry are not necessarily the most-successful county of the 21st century. During that period Dublin has produced one of the two greatest teams in the history of the sport, and definitely the best of this millennium. The 999 club all possess one Celtic Cross more than Kerry as a county have won since we bade farewell to 1999.
But next year Dublin will be operating in Division 2. Kerry for a 25th consecutive year will still be in Division 1. No other county has such a long-standing residency there.
Their real watershed was 30 years ago, when in a real changing of the guard Páidí Ó Sé in his first year won back Munster from Cork in Billy Morgan’s last year (of that tenure anyway). Since then has there been a year that either started or finished without Kerry being ranked among the top four teams in the country? The one year under Ó Sé they failed to make it to Croke Park (1999) they won the following year’s All-Ireland. Only four times over the subsequent 25 years have they failed to make the All-Ireland semi-finals – and each year after those setbacks it took the eventual All-Ireland champions to beat them in either an All-Ireland semi-final or final.
No county in the history of football has had 30 years of such sustained competitiveness. Not Dublin; if anything they were more consistently competitive from 1974 to 1997 than they were 2002 to 2025, given the latter period contained an almost-decade-long stretch without even contesting an All-Ireland final or even winning a league.
Not even Kerry either. Either side of the Golden Years were dog years. After winning the four-in-a-row in 1932 the county went the next four years without even contesting an All-Ireland. The longest stretch they’ve gone without playing in the final game of the year since Páidí took over is three years (2016-2018 in which time they contested two semi-finals and two league finals).
The year after beating Cork in Páirc Uí Chaoimh to end the Billy Morgan era, Kerry went back down there the following spring to beat them in the league final. That year would mark the first of nine leagues and nine All-Irelands they’ve subsequently won – and six doubles.
Another double this year would make it a round and remarkable 10 and 10 for 30.
The players change but the song remains the same. If the championship is something people aren't sure who'll win and then Kerry go on to win it, then the league is something teams aren't sure they want to win and Kerry go on to win it.
