Waiting on the wing
FOR Séamus Moynihan, the last two months have been climbing a ladder, the drudgery of battling an ankle injury that proved much more serious than he could ever imagined.
But, for the past two weeks or so, the player who for many symbolises the heart and soul of Kerry football has been walking with a spring in his step, literally.
After numerous setbacks, once feeling so desperate that he considered giving up the fight and closing the book on this year, he has managed to climb all the way up to the top of the ladder. The team announcement on Tuesday night confirmed all the recent speculation that he is ready for action, except that once more he will have to suffer the agony of sitting on the bench for an All-Ireland final.
His injury occurred in a club game on June 20 against Laune Rangers - one week after Kerry had played Cork in the Munster semi-final in Fitzgerald Stadium. He had suffered similar injuries in the past and he thought that he would recover in a week or two. His target was to be fit for the Munster final on July 11. If only he knew back then what he knows now.
"The more I trained, the worse it got. It just backfired on me. I was getting a worse story every time," he recalls.
After missing the Munster final, he recognised that he was also in trouble for the replay, but he banked on Kerry getting through - which would have given him a further month to get himself right. The alternative of a qualifier game much sooner would have been more bad news.
"I bit the bullet on the Limerick games. I felt I would be right if we got through and the four weeks suited me. But before the Dublin game I wondered if I was fooling myself. That was definitely the lowest point.
"Was it worth continuing, or should I just throw in the towel and take a year off. Thankfully, the medical staff and the boys kept plugging away. It kept me going. You'd always have the fear that it would flare up again. Of course, I was frightened, it could have been the end for me."
The road to recovery was long and difficult. He worked away diligently on his own in the gym and in the pool. For somebody so passionate about his football, it was boring - except that he could see light at the end of the tunnel. Gradually that light got brighter.
In retrospect, he feels that he might have been able to come back for the semi-final against Derry, except that he ran the risk of losing everything. Wisely, he bit his lip. Very quickly he realised that he had taken the correct decision, that he has managed to come back because he did it "the right way."
Nevertheless, while he is as near to being match-fit as he could have wished for, he recognises that it's going to be even more frustrating sitting on the bench. Knowing that the Kerry defence will be facing what he perceives to be their biggest challenge of the year.
"Aidan O'Mahony was blooded in the League and has done very well. Marc Ó Sé wasn't on for the Cork game, but he has been there before and played fantastic football for Gaeltacht. I hope the backs appreciate that they have yet to come across a forward line of the calibre of Mayo, with Kieran McDonald and Conor and Trevor Mortimer. These are quality forwards who will punish you if they get the room. They have done that against two teams we would have struggled against this year, Galway and Tyrone."
Moynihan agrees that Mayo have come through the more testing campaign, crediting them with surviving a particularly difficult challenge from a Fermanagh team that had claimed some notable scalps route. "Mayo played poorly the first day. But they showed great character and pulled out a result they shouldn't have. I felt they would win the replay well, but they still had to fight very hard for it.
"At any stage in our games with Limerick you couldn't feel comfortable and obviously, the first half of the Dublin game wasn't a great performance. I don't think against Derry we were put under the pressure we could have been, from say Tyrone or Armagh. These Mayo boys are going to be flying all over the place."
In terms of motivation, he feels that while Kerry have "fresher wounds" resulting from their defeats in Croke Park over the past three seasons, Mayo have been scarred by recent failures - specifically against Meath in 1996 and Kerry the following year. "They left the All-Ireland behind them in '96 and in '97 they didn't play to their standard. Looking back to that game, if Maurice Fitzgerald hadn't done so well ...
"Up to the time he was involved in that unfortunate incident with Billy O'Shea, he had been relatively quiet. But then he absolutely took off. Obviously after breaking a player's leg it could have gone either way, but he kicked some fantastic points. But you could also look at it from the point that Billy O'Shea was flying in the first 20 minutes. Only for Maurice playing as well as he did we would have been in trouble."
In Moynihan's view, Kerry have not radically altered their approach, even though there were very clear lessons to be learned from the defeat by Tyrone 12 months ago. But what has changed is the increased work ethic demanded by the management, he suggests. "That's pushed by Jack (O'Connor). Everybody has to pull up their socks, leave what energy they have in their bodies on the field. But I think every team is doing that, including Mayo."
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