No 37 for Kerry: The one no-one saw coming

By the time he got back to the dressing room, it was more vacant than victorious.

He walked amid the empty milk cartons and scattered towels for a moment. Then Eamonn Fitzmaurice allowed instinctive emotion grab hold of him for the first time this summer. No cartwheels. Nothing loud, because that’s not his style. Nothing more than a pair of clenched fists embedded in his chest as the magnitude of what he and the group has achieved began to take hold.

Kerry have won 37 All-Irelands now. They tend to arrive home in September with the cup every third or fourth year. But 2014 wasn’t like any other year, certainly nothing in the past 40.

This title was quarried from the granite of a disbelieving, faithless electorate who bought the transition talk of the spring and steeled themselves for a barren season or two.

Fitzmaurice had his beliefs rattled once or twice too. Cork’s Brian Hurley danced through Kerry in Tralee in the spring. The U21s fell to Cork again. People close to home were writing off the season before it had even revved up.

Asked after yesterday’s success over Donegal whether it could ever hope to compare to September success as a player, Fitzmaurice bucked the trend again and said it did compare. In fact, it was every bit as special a feeling as 2004 when he shut down Mayo’s Ciarán McDonald, or 2009 when he was riding shotgun as a selector with Jack O’Connor.

Perhaps that bit more special for someone who masterminded Kerry’s first All-Ireland as underdogs since Bomber and the boys went a bit haywire with the Dubs back in 1978.

It’s a moot point, but with the exception of Jack O’Connor, is there anyone else in Kerry who could have devised a series of Kerry game-plans this year based on the practicalities and pragmatism of modern day gaelic football?

Jim McGuinness said a mouthful yesterday when he suggested that neither side in yesterday’s final could be happy with the level of their performance. The same could be said of Kerry’s semi-final replay success over Mayo in Limerick. Both wins were predicated on Kerry’s ability to hang in there and play winning football. And in those gut-check moments, the Kingdom have been found more wanting than winning in recent years.

Each obstacle this summer brought a different Fitzmaurice gameplan. Winning football, the gridiron coaches call it. Doing what it takes to get over the line.

Nothing underlined the fathomless bond that has developed between Fitzmaurice and his squad like the team selections and substitutions he has made this summer. Once again yesterday, his and his selectors’ intuition for the right man at the right time was uncanny. When Paddy McBrearty started eating into Kerry’s three-point lead given them by Kieran Donaghy’s bizarre lead goal, Fitzmaurice acted decisively, drafting in Shane Enright to put out the flames. Except Enright had been removed in double quick time from the Mayo semi-final, after a nightmare first 20 minutes.

Barry John Keane was summoned after 48 minutes yesterday, pitched into a suffocating war of attrition that few thought he was ready for. Instead he thrived in the battle, kicking two frees, earning other and providing a critical outlet for a side desperate to keep possession and eat into the clock.

Three minutes from the death, Kerry’s lead, a precarious 2-8 to 0-12, Bryan Sheehan was summoned and instructed towards a 50m free that should have been beyond the physiological acumen of anyone throw into such a scenario. But Sheehan had history here. Six years ago, after Tyrone’s Paschal McConnell deflected Declan O’Sullivan’s All-Ireland winning goal attempt outside the post, Sheehan had the 45 to save Kerry. He pulled it left of the upright. Yesterday, he nailed that critical free.

Pieces of the jigsaw Fitzmaurice and his wise counsel on the sideline have got right this year.

None more so, of course, than Kieran Donaghy’s resurrection as a pivotal attacking weapon. On these pages last Saturday his friend Micheal Quirke detailed the depths of Donaghy’s devastation after getting no minute in the quarter-final. At training two nights later Fitzmaurice reveals he fessed up to the big Tralee man and told him he should have been brought on.

His gig yesterday was perpetual movement, never giving Eamonn Magee the chance to pin him down on the edge of the square. Donaghy almost operated as a corner-forward, drifting in when the supply lines appeared on the horizon. His 1-2 in a man of the match performance was worth much more in such a breathless environment than five points. And his 60th minute fisted effort that gave Kerry daylight at 2-8 to 0-10 was the moment Kerry’s supporters in a crowd of 82,184 truly began to believe this was about to happen.

The possessions stats in the final ten minutes would be instructive. The irony will not be lost on those who still believe individuals can beat the system that Donegal seemed paralysed by their own set-up as the final ebbed away from them. Desperately in need of the ball, they sat and say, watching Kerry run down the clock.

We wanted players to push up late on,” admitted a frustrated McGuinness. “We needed more intensity, to be slick on the turnover, we needed to press the ball more aggressively in the last few minutes, but we were caught between two things (defending and emerging from their system).”

There’s an argument, which will sustain many over the winter, that Kerry have learned from Ulster’s systematic approach, and reshaped it to their own ends. Needs must, Fitzmaurice said.

“If we had maintained our form for the last game of the league against Cork, this probably wouldn’t have been as much of a surprise,” mused Fitzmaurice. “But we played so poorly that day that it threw a gallon of water on any expectations.

“We were too open, simple as. Dublin scored big against us in the semi last year. You’re not going to win an All-Ireland if you’re conceding scores like that. There’s a saying in American sports that good forwards or offence wins you games, but good defence wins you championships.

“We knew we were going to have to start at the back and be much more solid, but at the same time stay loyal to Kerry football.”

Despite their blood-rush opening, a Paul Geaney goal after 49 seconds, the first half was hardly what traditionally constitutes the ‘Kerry football’ brand. By the interval, Donegal had a handle on Kerry’s game-plan and were restricting them to high, hopeless efforts from outside the scoring arc. After the initial score-burst Kerry contributed two points in 33 minutes of first half football. Not that Jim McGuinness was too pleased either with his charges.

In an admirably frank interview afterwards he accepted: “Kerry obviously had a game plan, but as a manager you think of your own team, and the big disappointment is we didn’t give a performance that we’re capable of. And that was the one thing we wanted, to have no regrets and to empty it all on the pitch, because then no matter what the result you can live with it. But now we have to look at the fact that we got nowhere near our performance level but we still got within a whisker of sneaking a draw.

And maybe if we got a draw, the performance and the intensity could have been there the next day, but that’s not something I’ll dwell on. The game was today, the game was 3.30 and we needed to be able to deliver a performance level worthy of winning the All-Ireland, and that wasn’t the case.”

He didn’t see much of the minor final but Fitzmaurice will have been chuffed too to see so many of his Pobal Scoil Corca Dhuibhne charges end Kerry’s 20-year wait yesterday in the grade. Two All-Irelands in a season of transition? It would be easy to run away with the notion that Kerry are back to stay. Jim Gavin knows all about such presumptions.

That’s another of Fitzmaurice’s commandments — walk easy when the jug is full.