Alan Smith: Kildare will be fearless facing Kerry
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.
“They’re All-Ireland champions,” said the Sarsfields attacker. “You don’t have to say much about Kerry. They’re All-Ireland champions for a reason. We’re going to be massive underdogs again like we were [against Cork]. It’s gonna be a tough game, but we’ll take a lot of confidence.
“We’re after winning our last three games. It’s a massive win for us. I’ve been on the panel since 2008 and we fell short against big teams every single year for years. It’s my eighth attempt to beat a big team. It’s taken eight years so we’ll take massive confidence out of this. We’ve nothing to fear next week.”
The qualifiers, for some, are a penance; for Kildare they’re seen as restorative waters to heal provincial wounds. Since 2008, they have played 23 times in the back door, winning 20, drawing one and losing just two.
The week-to-week consistency seems to suit them, so it was no surprise to hear Smith remark that neither the performance nor the result against Cork came out of the blue to them, given their preparatory lead-in, with victories against Offaly and Longford.
“The turnaround after the provincial finals? We were there ourselves a couple of years ago [in 2009], it’s hard to get up for it. Since the Dublin game, we’ve been going very well. Probably nothing is being said about us, but we know we’ve been ticking away nicely. We had a good win against Offaly, it was all about getting over the line after the Dublin game. If we needed to compete [against Cork], we needed to put in a good performance against Longford and we did that. We racked up a big score for a team that apparently has no forwards.”
Yet, Kildare had their own troubles. The 19-point loss to Dublin was described by Smith as “embarrassing”. That came after a second successive league demotion that had the squad and management feeling the heat at home.
“To be honest, it was a tough year. All the Kildare fans were saying that Jason was coming under serious pressure, as well. We were well aware of it after the league games. We got relegated out of Division Two which was very disappointing. After the league we parked it.
“We can’t worry about that until next year. We knew in the championship, if we put things right… people probably won’t talk about the league anymore and, at the end of the day, it’s all about championship. We know we’re championship players and that’s when we play our best football.”
A nice habit to hold.
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