Last quarter hoodoo still haunting Kerry
The Crossmolina man proved to be the unwilling catalyst for Kerry’s sprint for the tape in the third quarter when Colm Cooper’s speculative sideline ball plopped into his hands, spilled out through his fingers and onto the protruding toe of Darragh Ó Sé.
Before that, Kerry were slowly being manoeuvred back onto the ropes, with Mayo drawing level for the first time in 21 minutes thanks to Ciaran McDonald’s free three minutes earlier.
Even if Ciaran Whelan wasn’t sitting at home watching the game, he might have got a shiver of déjà vu tingling down his spine.
Twelve months earlier, in the same period of Dublin’s quarter-final against Kerry, Whelan had galloped through the Kingdom’s defence only to see his explosive shot cannon back off Diarmuid Murphy’s crossbar.
Then, as yesterday, a handful of inches proved to be a watershed, with Kerry hungrily grabbing their slice of luck and burying each game as a contest in the following 20-minute spell.
“Darragh’s goal was the turning point of the game, definitely,” said Paul Galvin. “They’d come on strong up to that, drawing level, and there’s no doubt but that Darragh’s effort swung it in our favour. We needed it because they owned the ball for the last 10 minutes.
“They were really on top. We let them dominate for the last period of the game and that seems to be a pattern that we follow going back to last year even. We play well in the third quarter and then fall away in the fourth quarter.”
Galvin’s afternoon showed just how sharply Kerry’s game dropped off in that last 15 minutes. Within four minutes of his introduction as a sub, he had kicked two points to leave eight points between the sides.
He kicked another with 11 minutes to go, which is just as well because having seemingly been introduced for a valedictory ending, his trio of points ended up being the difference between themselves and Mayo when the last ball was kicked.
Nobody in the Kerry camp was even bothering to mount a case for the defence over that last period, the unanimous consensus returning a report card of ‘must do better’.
“It’s a bit of a concern that we didn’t put the game away,” William Kirby admitted.
“They scored five late points without reply which is something we’ll have to look at.
“If we get the chance of going two or three points up against Cork in the semi-final we’ll have try and get further ahead rather than let them back into the game. It’s something we have to work on.”
More than once, the word ‘complacency’ was bandied around afterwards, as it usually is when a team so heavily fancied is, in the end, run so close.
Kerry recognised its whiff earlier in the week though, and a major effort was used to eradicate it before the throw-in.
“Jack (O’Connor) actually brought us together this morning and we don’t usually have a meeting on the morning of a game,” Mike Frank Russell explained.
“He was conscious that there was complacency setting in and that could have been a big factor today.
“Even though you might not try and listen to it during the week it can stick to your mind eventually.
“It’s a dangerous game. Look at it this way, if you lose an All-Ireland final like they did last year, you’re going to try and come out and redeem yourself and get the confidence back among your supporters.”
The question remains whether Kerry still have more juice to expend in the tank this season or if, like the Kilkenny hurlers last summer, the road back to the summit only 12 months after reaching it proves to be a bridge too far.
Paul Galvin accepts neither he nor anyone else in the Kerry camp can answer that emphatically yet.
Cork will go a long way to answering that particular puzzle, with the Finuge forward pointing to the sides’ last joust in Croke Park three years ago as a cautionary tale for the favourites.
“They’ll feel they’re due one over on us, especially after the last day up here. They’ll be very anxious to avenge that and they had a great win today. They’ll be very dangerous.
“They were probably unlucky not to get a result against us the last day. Possibly, we might have preferred to avoid them.”
