Kingdom’s heir of confidence

Anyone hear of PJ Ryan?

Murphy’s got previous too – a whole string of memorable stops during a turbulent campaign and one cape-and-pants rescue from obliteration against Sligo in Tralee.

Given that his obituary was being penned after last year’s semi-final double dose of Cork, it’s some turnaround.

All Over to All-Star.

Much of it, the 34-year-old says, is down to the memory vault.

“You might have a couple of bad nights in training, but at this stage I can draw solace from the fact that I’ve been there, and I’ve been through it before,” says Murphy.

“If things aren’t going great for me, I can toughen it out. If you don’t have self-belief and confidence in goal, you’re in trouble. It feeds through to the backs, especially at inter-county level. If there’s a chink, it’ll be exposed at this level. It’s an unforgiving environment, fairly ruthless. Confidence? That’s our game right there.”

That the Dingle man greets each imposter – boasts and boos – with equal contempt is good for personal equilibrium. When Cork’s Pearse O’Neill bored a hole in Murphy’s net in Killarney in June, it must have felt like deja vu all over again. The keeper was caught on his near post by the Aghada man in last year’s semi-final replay.

“Form comes from the training field. Maybe at the start of the championship, I was struggling with my game. I thought we had a dip in training after the league. The quality of football wasn’t great. And personally I wasn’t going great in training. But you keep at it, you work hard.

“Every goal you concede you’d be disappointed, but that one against Cork in Killarney? Yeah, things happen fast and you’ve got to react quickly in those situations, and perhaps you could see we weren’t going well at the start of the championship and during the qualifiers.”

However, if many of his colleagues were searching for their form in the qualifiers, Murphy, Tomás O Se and Paul Galvin were leading from the front.

The significance of an outstanding double save just before half time from Longford’s David Barden in Pearse Park was only crystallised by Kerry’s second-half stupor.

Nor will Murphy’s late penalty save from Sligo’s David Kelly, and his fingertip effort onto the post from Alan Brogan’s piledriver in the quarter-final, end up in the out-takes.

“I would say if you ask Alan Brogan he was going for a point,” muses Murphy. “I think he didn’t quite make the right contact, but when things are going your way it comes back off the crossbar and finds safety. A few minutes later Diarmuid Connolly hits the crossbar again, and I didn’t even see that one.

“Those qualifier games were seriously tough. Longford was very physical, Kieran (Donaghy’s) injury threw us a small bit and we didn’t react well to their pressure on the day.

“Sligo? We were in a bad situation. If they’d scored a goal (from the penalty), we’d have been knee deep in it. (But) there was no great fallout because the draw was the following day, and straight away you were looking forward to the next match.”

Murphy’s dossier on penalty takers would have been of assistance facing Sligo – if he kept one.

“I don’t work on penalties, I find there are parts of the game you can overanalyse,” Murphy says. “A case of too much going on in your head, paralysis by analysis. You prepare for one penalty taker, and he’s not around when the decision is given. I play it as I see it.”

The Kerry man also made what he considers a routine stop from Meath’s Joe Sheridan in the semi-final. It’s certainly not what he remembers from the final minutes. “Gutted,” he sighs about Cian Ward’s late consolation goal. “Sickened. You have to be. It was one of those ones that accelerated off the wet ground. I felt I should have got to it.”

AFTER winning the league almost by default, Kerry were run over by a voracious Cork side in Páirc Uí Chaoimh.

It provided Jack O’Connor’s management team with the window to work their way back to competitiveness.

“We trained hard, very hard before the qualifiers. Then it was meet on the Wednesday, game Sunday. That helped us because you won a game, you were paired with someone else straight away and the focus moved to that. There was little analysis of the previous game. You play. You move on. That suited us this year.”

Murphy, who earns his living with Axa Insurance, is suitably insulated from the view that the GAA public saw the real Kerry once they hit Croke Park.

“Cork outplayed us (in Munster) They were more motivated, fitter, and carried out their game plan a lot better. You could argue that, with the exception of the Dublin game, we’ve been just doing just enough to get through the games. We’d like to think we’re better than that, and we’ve improved considerably (from Páirc Ui Chaoimh). We’ve put a few more things into our game, we’re better tactically than we were that day.”

And the second coming of Jack? Has Murphy seen this new, Zen-like O’Connor? “He seems more relaxed. Therefore he’s more in control of what’s happening to himself and what’s around him. He’s delegating more, sitting back and watching. In terms of discipline and tactics, we’ve improved as the season has gone on. Jack is getting guys united, playing and working for each other. That’s very important in a dressing room.”