Kelly ready to fend off another barrage

Goalkeepers. There is something about the role which attracts a different kind of individual across the sporting spectrum.

Examples? Bruce Grobbelaar, Rene Higuita, Paddy Cullen, Shane Curran, Ollie Walsh, Davy Fitzgerald — there’s something about them.

Among themselves they recognise this, and more than any other position on the field they have their own fraternal bond.

So it was that one of the iconic pictures after the drawn All-Ireland final of a few weeks ago was the two custodian, Pa Kelly (Clare) and Anthony Nash (Cork) acknowledging each other after the match.

“I was saying I don’t want to see him coming up taking 21s the next day and we had a smile,” Kelly explained. “I’d know him pretty well, we had a laugh at the end. Whatever happens on the field stays on the field in my view.”

What had happened on the field has set GAA forums into overdrive in the three weeks since. A basic requirement for any top hurling keeper these days is a long and accurate puckout and more and more teams are also beginning to utilise that asset further out the field with keepers being called on to take long-range frees but more pertinently, to go for goal from close-range placed balls.

Kelly does it for club (Inagh Kilnamona) and county but got no opportunity the last day. Instead it was his counterpart who was making the headlines in that department. Pa saved his first effort, charged from his line and courageously took the full force on the hip. Nash goaled the second, a bullet that flew into the rigging while Conor Ryan ‘saved’ with the ball hitting his hurley and deflecting onto the crossbar.

In typical fashion, however, because regardless of circumstance any keeper hates to see that ball in their own net, Kelly is critical of his performance.

“I did okay in parts but I wasn’t happy letting in three goals. As a goalkeeper you pride yourself on not conceding goals and I conceded three. I wasn’t happy with the first one, it was very soft (brilliant Conor Lehane solo effort, beat Pa with a shot across the body to the far corner). To rub salt into the wounds Nash came up and buried a 21-yard free — that didn’t help! They are things I’m going to work on.”

One thing he has been working on for years is his own free-taking — he wouldn’t mind getting an opportunity to show Nash and Cork what he’s capable of this evening.

“The last three I got (with Clare), one was in a league final, one in a championship semi-final, then the game v Waterford in 2012; the three of them were in the exact same spot, the corner of the D and I don’t think I hit any of the three of them properly. I wouldn’t be bad — I hit the long-range frees for the club but it’s a tough enough thing to do. It’s grand when you get them in the middle of the goal but when you’re in the corner of the D it’s tough to score them at the best of times. Nash’s strike is more powerful than Joe Canning. I’d say he practises a lot: he strikes the ball so well. I was with him on the Munster Railway Cup squad and he was taking them before training on me — nine out of 10 he was absolutely smashing the ball. He doesn’t mishit so he probably has a better shot than Joe and that’s a fair achievement because we all know Joe’s ability. What’s helping him as well is he’s using the goalie bas and has less chance of missing the ball.”

Speaking of hurleys and the big bas, when it comes to having a spare or two, Pa will never be caught short, not now anyway. “I’d be awful. At home I’d say I have up on 50 hurleys anyway, easily, but lads would be coming to the house robbing them, telling my mother ‘I’m just taking a lend of this hurley’ — I’d never see it again but these things happen. I bring nine or 10 to matches. I learned my lesson — we played Galway in a challenge game last January down in Clarecastle and remember the frost was really bad; I had five hurleys with me and before the game started I had cracked four of them! They were fresh hurleys and I obviously left them in my car. I was in an awful way and I said I was never going to get caught again.”

That’s Pa Kelly, that’s keepers. Over the top? Perhaps, but when you’re the last man standing, when so much responsibility falls on you, when every mistake is magnified, aren’t you entitled to a little eccentricity?