Alan Smith: Kildare will be fearless facing Kerry

Alan Smith believes Kildare have nothing to fear against Kerry in Sunday’s All-Ireland quarter-final meeting at Croke Park, now that they have finally claimed the scalp of one of football’s traditional heavyweights.

Jason Ryan’s side upset most of the pre-match expectations on Saturday by recording a comfortable eight-point victory over a Cork side that reached a Division One league final and then came within a whisker of pipping Kerry to a Munster title.

It was a seminal evening for a county that was desperate to return to the high point of the Kieran McGeeney era, when quarter-finals were a given and ambitions, rightly or wrongly, stretched beyond each summer towards September itself.