Stepping up to the mic

THIS just in from the most lethal full forward line in football.

Kerry kick off their elongated Championship effort (see panel) unconvincingly against Limerick, and it is an effort. Captain for the day Dara Ó Cinneide is taken off in the second half. And not because of injury.

Dropped for the Munster semi-final against Cork, Ó Cinnéide comes on for young, small and out of his depth Colm Cooper. In the replay, Ó Cinneide and Cooper start, but are again withdrawn as Kerry collapse indignantly into self doubt. Four weeks later, an out of form Michael Frank Russell is taken off against Kildare in a qualifier in Thurles. This from the most lethal full forward line in football. So go figure.

Nobody quite knows where the hairpin came in Kerry’s season, not even Ó Cinnéide, one of the most lucid and analytical minds in the game. But somewhere around the grotesque display at Pairc Uí Chaoimh would be a good starting point.

In fact, it was. There are a lot of myths and long legged stories about the team meeting on the Tuesday night after Kerry relinquished their Munster title. However ahead of their first qualifier against Wicklow, there were a few no brainers. “We were on a rebuilding mission against Wicklow and everyone knew they were one step away from the door, including myself,” Ó Cinneide reflects.

“We tried to be positive with the Galway precedent from the qualifiers when we sat down after the Cork defeat. We really had to look at ourselves and what we saw was a group blaming everything and everybody but themselves.”

It helped that Kerry’s road to recovery took them up to Portlaoise and out of limelight, but wreaking their revenge on the unsuspecting day trippers from the Garden county and from Fermanagh a week later clearly had a therapeutic benefit.

The Gaeltacht full forward can’t answer for Cooper and Russell but he has marvelled at their remarkable capacity to let things wash over them. Ó Cinnéide replaced Cooper against Cork in Killarney, and as he drifted in an aimless afternoon memorable only for the weather and Ireland losing on penalties to Spain in the World Cup, pondered what the substitution might do to the Crokes youngster.

“You’re thinking ‘I hope that doesn’t upset him, drag him down.’ But he just shook hands going off, was in training the following day, up to his usual tricks, full of beans. He has the Crokes mentality.”

Anyone truly conversant with Kerry football will acknowledge the durability, the confidence, even the cockiness of Dr Crokes players. It’s a Killarney thing, but I’ve always felt that basketball has honed Crokes’ ability to retain possession for minutes on end without going anywhere. Running down the clock is an improbable tactic in the high octane environment of Championship football, but no one does it better than the Killarney side. Anyone who was at Austin Stack Park two years ago when Crokes played keepball in a small circle against Ó Cinnéide’s Gaeltacht understands how Colm Cooper doesn’t get fazed.

“They beat us in the county final with that mentality, they held the ball for the last five minutes,” recalls Ó Cinnéide, still wincing at the thought. “And Colm carries that mentality into the team. If he’s beaten out to the first five balls, it doesn’t bother him. You’d see Marc Ó Sé beating him in training regularly, but then he’ll get 1-3 in the last ten minutes.”

Ó Cinnéide would enjoy being at the end of Kerry’s pass and move football, the one firing the bullets, but he acknowledges that his two corner forwards are deadlier in the red zone this season. Ó Cinnéide has been loading the rifles, and belatedly getting some recognition for it. He is probably too sensitive to criticism, but it’s hard not to be when you are the favoured scapegoat in Kerry’s attack. Though Kerry has functioned with a spluttering half forward line for five years (Ó Cinnéide being a member of it on occasions), the Gaeltacht man is invariably the first name into the bitching grinder. And he’s human enough to admit that there’s a few he’d like to meet next Monday morning if Kerry win the All-Ireland. And no, they aren’t members of the media.

It’s hard to believe that Cooper, Russell and Ó Cinnéide might have been fighting a confidence crisis earlier this year but for the latter two, the debacle of last year’s All-Ireland semi final was also a factor.

“When I was dropped for the Cork game, it was the first time I hadn’t started a Championship game for seven or eight years. I had a good chat with the selectors but I was fighting my game anyway, wasn’t comfortable with the football, wasn’t in tune with what was going on.”

When he was replaced again at Pairc Uí Chaoimh, Ó Cinnéide reminded himself of how he felt last September. “When you’re down with football, you try to find something else to occupy yourself with. When we were beaten by Meath, I buried myself in work, buried myself in the Gaeltacht’s preparations for the county championship, which was probably wrong because I needed a rest more than anything.

“But you’ve got to remember that this was a different scenario for me, to be sitting in the dugout in Killarney when two years previously I had scored 2-5 in the corresponding game. It was hard, but it gives you a touch of what you don’t want, spurs you on.”

This time Dara stripped everything down, pieced it back together. The free taker who builds his confidence with 13 metre frees, the golfer who rolls in two foot putts to get confidence flowing. “I went back to what got me on the team. Working hard, even if you don’t score, just scrapping, foraging, dispossessing backs coming out with the ball, getting maybe a touch physical, which you’d prefer not to do, but it gets you back in there. Involved.”

Recently, he has been a pivotal figure, but frowns at the thought that Kerry’s footballing masterclasses against Galway and Cork merit an All-Ireland. “So did Meath last year.” He has matured too, and not only as a footballer who once preferred the sixty yard lob pass behind the full back when a simple pass to a colleague would have retained possession.

“It can be a good thing in easy games (to try the killer pass) but that’s a thing we are trying to work out of the team at the moment, me and a few other forwards. Mentally I’ve matured an awful lot. In the last three or four years I only get nervous the day of a game, the right type of nervousness. Up to ’97, I couldn’t sleep at all before big games.”

That final, against Mayo, also taught Ó Cinnéide something about the folly of over preparation. “I was all prepared to mark Pat Holmes and I ended up on Kenneth Mortimer. I was so bad I won an Allstar for him,” he laughs.

“There are so many variables. What if the day is wet, if Armagh get two early goals, like they did in the League game in Tralee? And then they realise we have a kick in us, and we can come back. How do they react to that? What if Colm or Mike Frank or Darragh Ó Sé pulls a hamstring after five minutes?

“The big fear is that you go out on a given day and something happens... like against Meath last year. People ask what happened but to this day we still don’t know, that’s the big fear we have. Fear of the unknown.”

As we speak, captain Darragh Ó Sé is fending off requests for press interviews, and Ó Cinnéide, a journalist with Radio na Gaeltachta in Ballydavid, can’t understand the perceived slight. Certain players choose not to talk because they are young and vulnerable, others because they don’t want to. Not beforehand, at any rate.

Besides, can anyone seriously question Ó Sé’s ability to lead. “He’s not that type of captain, in the way that Ray Silke was Galway captain,” explains Ó Cinnéide. “But ask any Gaeltacht player who they owe their county medal to for last year. The way he drove us on between the Meath game and the county final, the way he refocused, picked everyone up. His presence, talking, he has this thing... he drives teams.”

Kerry will watch plenty of video footage of their All-Ireland opponents again this week. It’s a Paidí thing. Looking and wondering how other teams made Armagh look ordinary. It’s reassuring to cover all the angles, all the scenarios, but there is still a fear in Kerry that if the full forward line is shut down completely, is there a definable Plan B?

“We don’t know,” muses Ó Cinnéide. “Croke Park is so big that it’s difficult to double up. We would like to think that one on one, we can handle most things. If Armagh are sticky that we don’t even notice because we’re so in tune with what we’re doing. That’s what makes it.......” He struggles for the right word before he slips back into rhythm.

Maybe Gooch walked by.