In the name of the father

IN THEIR curmudgeonly moments, Kerry football supporters like to berate Mick O’Dwyer for his loyalty to the Golden Year greats at the expense of those hoping to prolong the Kingdom’s monopoly of the 70’s and 80’s.

They decry the ‘lost generation’ of players to the green and gold, never pausing to identify anyone beyond one or two possible cases of players being in the wrong county at the wrong time.

“Who were those players?,” Pat Spillane asks rhetorically. “There was perhaps 30 players of a really high standard in Kerry during that period, and by the time we won the last All-Ireland in 1986, most of the fringe players had established themselves anyway — Timmy Dowd, Ger Lynch, John Kennedy, my brother Tom, John Higgins.”