Kerry may be older, but they’re wiser

KERRY might beat Dublin, but the occasion won’t.

All-Ireland finals might have become a law unto themselves in recent years but that law doesn’t really apply in the case of this Dublin team.

Younger members of the Cork forward line admitted after the 2009 All-Ireland final that while they had beaten Tyrone up there only a month earlier in a landmark game, going from playing in front of 55,000 to playing in front of a full house of 82,000 was a shock to the senses. This Dublin team have regularly played in front of full houses; every Leinster final from 2005 to 2009, the past two All-Ireland semi-finals.

They’ve minimised and handled all the hype too that goes with the lead up to an All-Ireland final. All talk of banquets and tickets were wrapped up within three days of the Donegal game. Players were measured for their banquet suit in that time frame but won’t see it until after the game. For the past two years Dublin have been employing the services of the performance psychologist Caroline Currid, who worked with the Tyrone footballers in 2008 and the Tipperary hurlers in 2009 and 2010. This is her fourth consecutive year preparing for an All-Ireland final and in those previous three her team always performed. So will the Dubs.

No, if they lose here, it’ll because they were beaten by a better team, as most of their championship exits have largely boiled down to in the last 16 years. One of those exits that we keep coming back to is the one to Kerry in 2007. The 2009 clash between the teams has regularly been recalled in recent weeks but the one we keep thinking back to is 2007. In ways, it’s a bit of a misnomer to say that Dublin haven’t played in an All-Ireland final in 16 years because that 2007 semi-final showdown was essentially that year’s All-Ireland final, just as the previous year the real decider was the Kerry-Armagh quarter-final epic.

Dublin lost that underplayed classic in 2007 by only two points. And if you look at it, the Kerry backs — most of whom are still playing — were in their physical prime back then. The Kerry midfield, with Darragh Ó Sé and Seamus Scanlon putting in serious shifts, were more formidable then, while the Kerry forwards were individually, whatever about collectively, as good as they are now.

Dublin, meanwhile, are generally considered to be a better team now — mentally, physically, tactically, skillswise. Ciaran Whelan would be about the only player who would seriously upgrade this 2011 selection. So beyond saying that Pillar’s stint wasn’t as poor or as gimmicky as it’s often portrayed, our point is this: why are Kerry favourites when they’re hardly better than they were in ‘07 and Dublin are considerably better than the one that just lost by two points that day?

The last time this column called an All-Ireland football final wrong was 2002, a streak we’re not slow to say few others have. But we just knew that Kerry had too much guile and scoring power for Mayo and Cork, that Tyrone had enough of both for Kerry, and that Cork had put in too many hard yards to be denied by whipper-snappers like Down. But what makes us tentative about predicting a Kerry victory this time is because this final has a real look of 2002 about it, this Dublin team have a real Armagh 2002 look about them.

Just like Armagh, they’ve got as many scars as provincial medals. They’re inch-fighters; in January they were training three times a week at six in the morning and even now workout in the gym at least once a week at 6.30am. They play an honest, physical, defensively-astute pressure game. Their forwards might be a notch below Kerry’s, but only a notch; in the Brogans they have their Stevie McDonnell and Oisin McConville. If there’s a team to make all those thirtysomethings in the Kerry backline feel old men, it’s Dublin.

Dublin so much fit the profile of an All-Ireland winning team, ticking all the boxes that Cork ticked last year. But the way we’ve squared the 2007 conundrum is this: Kerry for the past 10 years have been a bit like Michael Jordan in the 1990s. When he won his first three NBA titles, he had a brilliant mental game and incomparable athleticism. When he came out of the retirement to win another three titles on the trot, his athleticism had waned a notch but his mental game had gone up another again to compensate. So it is with Kerry. Tomás Ó Sé and Tom O’Sullivan might have lost that little step but it’s more than compensated by the greater understanding of the game and themselves they now have from even 2007. There’s a sense of mastery about them, which is why we expect them to just about master Dublin too, by about two points again.