Lyons: Time for Dublin to deliver

KEVIN HEFFERNAN once announced that an All-Ireland final win against Kerry was actually worth two. Tommy Lyons would go even further.

“Oh, I think it’s worth three. Kevin is playing it short,” said Lyons who went on to reel off supporting facts and figures which, while slightly inaccurate, painted the same depressing picture for his former side as the real numbers.

Dublin have beaten Kerry just twice in the championship since 1934 with both victories squeezed into the back-to-back 1976 and 1977 seasons and they have failed to win one of the nine summer tussles between the counties since the second of those successes.

Not much of a rivalry, all being told, and Lyons has seen enough Kerry performances in the month of September to know they very rarely travel to the capital without their A game.

“I just think Kerry will be awful right on the day and Dublin will need to be awful, awful good. They’ll need a Tyrone-type performance to beat Kerry and maybe a little more because they have the genius up the other end.”

Like the rest of the country, Lyons was more than happy to indulge in the who-will-mark-who debate and, though the individual battles at both ends fascinate, it is Cooper who earned the majority of his attention.

“When Cooper isn’t pulling the trigger himself, he’s pulling the strings and, if you’re talking about Cooper, who’s going to mark him? I mean, I’d pay 500 quid the last day [against Mayo] to watch him. It was just a sublime performance from a GAA player.

“You talk about Messi, he’s our Messi. To think of the goal he got against Mayo. I watched it slowly on the video a few times. It wasn’t even a 20% chance of a goal when that ball broke out on the 14-yard line. Two seconds later it’s in the back of the net. That’s genius.”

Cooper’s class was just as evident when Kerry and Dublin last met in the championship back in 2009. The Dr Crokes forward had the ball in Stephen Cluxton’s net long before that quarter-final was a minute old and added seven points to his tally thereafter.

Kerry’s ability to kill a contest in double-quick time was on display yet again in this year’s semi-final when they launched a flurry of blows on Mayo after the restart and that capability remains Lyons’ greatest fear.

Stay with Kerry for 55 minutes, however, and he believes Dublin have every chance of going on to claim the honours in a game which he still cannot believe has taken quite so long to materialise.

Had THAT Ray Cosgrove free against Armagh been an inch to the left, Lyons would have managed a Dublin team against Kerry in the All-Ireland final nine years ago and players like Cluxton, Alan Brogan and Bryan Cullen wouldn’t have been kept hanging this long.

Lyons experienced both ends of the hype spectrum as Dublin manager but Pat Gilroy has handled that monster skilfully this last three years — and this last three weeks in particular — and Kerry will not be immune to the unforeseen side-effects of the blue revolution.

“It will be the first time Kerry will be in the stadium in a good while with 82,000 and, when push comes to shove, there’ll be 55,000 Dubs in that stadium the next day. Neutrals will shout for Dublin the next day even if they would shout for anyone else but Dublin normally.

“People understand and accept that the GAA need an All-Ireland in Dublin more than they need one in Kerry at this stage. Dublin have had a great run in all the grades this year but they need a few canisters to put up on the wall to [show they can] deliver.”