Walsh relives pain game of defeat to Dubs

On Sunday, Eamonn Fitzmaurice subjected his players to a horror show, the lowlights reel of last year’s All-Ireland semi-final defeat to Dublin.

Ahead of their return to the scene of the “crime” on Saturday, Donnchadh Walsh and his team-mates pored over what went wrong for them for the second time in three seasons against their keenest foes.

The pain of Michael Darragh Macauley getting his fingertips to a Dublin restart and setting in motion Kevin McManamon for his goal had to be revisited.

“Eamonn showed us that and I am sure that is just what he wanted us to do, to just remember the bit of hurt,” said Walsh.

“It is good to remember just going into a game, to bring a bit of hurt, but he also re-emphasised the unforced errors that we made that day.

“Even if you limited one of them, it would have meant that we would have been a point up on that kick-out rather than it being a level game, and things could have changed.”

The 29-year-old may be one of the elder statesmen in the Kerry panel, but his record against Dublin is deep in the red.

Since that “startled earwigs” quarter-final win five years ago, Kerry have lost five of the counties’ six meetings.

The most significant of them came, of course, in the 2011 All-Ireland final, a defeat Walsh took particularly badly as he had to start a physiotherapy course a couple of days later in Dublin’s Royal College of Surgeons.

None of his fellow students recognised him. Initially. “They had been asking me if I had been at the game, but I was too down in the dumps that week to tell them. I did not have the heart to tell them that I was actually playing.

“It was funny — a few weeks afterwards there was a presentation on sports injuries and there was a picture of me used in the presentation and they were wondering, ‘What are you doing up there wearing a Kerry jersey?’”

Walsh had Darran O’Sullivan for a house-mate last year and the pair trained together, putting Cian O’Neill’s sessions into practice. These days he does them on his own, assured of the improvements he’s seen in his own conditioning.

This is an area in which Kerry, prior to O’Neill’s arrival, appeared to be trailing rival counties.

“I suppose it’s hard to know how far behind we were. I know, definitely, fellas have gotten a lot stronger since Cian has come in.

“Are we fitter? Yeah. But Cian hasn’t forgotten the skill levels. My skill levels have increased as well, under Cian. So it’s not just the physicality. Every modern day coach realises if you’re forgetting about the skill level, you’re going nowhere.”

The responsibility Fitzmaurice has entrusted in Walsh was another reason behind his All Star nomination last year. Although he wouldn’t see himself as a natural leader, he said: “Eamonn gave me the encouragement to take that on a bit more. I would normally have been a quiet guy, get my job done in the background, but Eamonn wants 15 leaders on each team. That bit of encouragement suited me to have a good season.”

Even if that means emptying the tank and coming off with 10 or 15 minutes to go, as he did against Dublin last September, then so be it.

“Winning a place on the Kerry team, you’re only about 5% better than the player on the bench.

“So a tired Donnchadh Walsh mightn’t be as good or as 100% fresh as the substitute coming in.

“At wing forward there’s a lot of mileage too, and my game would be based around high mileage, and inevitably I get tired towards the end. I’ve no problem with that.

“Any manager will tell a player they want them to burn themselves out, and hold their hands up, and let a fresh man in.”

Neither would Walsh throw his nose up at a return to midfield, where he played a lot of underage football.

“If ever I felt wing forward wasn’t working out for me I definitely give midfield or somewhere else a shot.”

Walsh remembers the dramatic reaction to Kerry’s poor start last season and how people thought they “had forgotten to play football”.

He’s more optimistic going into this campaign. “We had a very bad start to the Allianz Leagues last year and put ourselves under too much pressure but it was probably down to the transition of new management.

“We trained pretty hard through the first month in January last year which meant we were a bit flat going into the league.

“This year we have pulled it back a bit and hopefully we are that bit fresher.

“The interpretation of those opening defeats was very much that Kerry didn’t have the depth to cope with the older players. That is something Kerry still have to prove.”