Five talking points from the weekend’s GAA action
Problem, of course, is the wrong word for the issue of where Donegal’s Michael Murphy should be positioned for optimum effect.
But it is a head scratcher for manager Rory Gallagher all the same and the suggestion is that the big man may spend more time at full-forward against Mayo than he has in the position so far this summer.
On Saturday, the Glenswilly man was spared the aggressive double and triple teaming he’d have been subjected to at full-forward in the Ulster championship
But he played the second half of the Galway game in his accustomed role close to goals and proved a real handful. His knockdown to Ryan McHugh for the game’s most important score, Donegal’s second goal, highlighted how difficult he is to contain under the dropping ball in that position.
Mayo, of course, don’t need any reminding of that fact with the memory of his goal early in the 2012 final unlikely to be forgotten.
Going on sheer stats alone, Kerry are 35 points a better team than Cork. After all, the Kingdom beat a Kildare side by 27 points that had previously overcome Cork by eight.
The reality, of course, is a lot different and Cork must be pretty sore this morning their championship interest was ended by a Kildare side that performed so limply on the big stage. The result only lent further credence to the belief Cork were simply fatigued in Thurles last weekend when they lost surprisingly to the Lilywhites.
Had that game been played yesterday, affording Cork a vital extra week to recover, chances are the Rebels wouldn’t have been brushed aside nearly as easily, if at all. It’s cold comfort for Cork but they can count themselves unfortunate for catching Kildare at the wrong time.
In this era of blanket defending, it is ironic the record for the most amount of scores tallied in a quarter-final tie was broken not just once but twice yesterday.
Kerry’s 7-16 to 0-10 win over Kildare amounted to 47 points scored between the two teams, one more than in Cork’s 1-27 to 2-10 demolition of Donegal in 2009. As the day panned out, Dublin’s 2-23 to 2-15 win over Fermanagh, containing an aggregate of 50 points, would move the record on again.
What exactly it all means is debatable but big scores are clearly still there to be extracted at spacious Croke Park regardless of what the systems teams are employing.
Criticising Dublin for reaching an All-Ireland semi-final by virtue of their smallest winning margin of the season, eight points, is perhaps clutching at straws. But there is room for improvement. For the first time in this year’s championship Stephen Cluxton conceded a goal, not once but twice.
Now the first goal may have been an aberration for all sorts of reasons but the second concession was avoidable as Dublin’s defence was caught at sixes and sevens. On the general point of Dublin not receiving a thorough Championship examination yet, it still exists too, after four games.
What’s definite is that Mayo or Donegal won’t go so easy on them on August 30. On the plus side, Paul Flynn’s apparent spike in form is encouraging while Bernard Brogan is matching talent with work-rate. His last point of the first-half when he shrugged off his man and split the posts from an impossible angle showed how much he still craves success.
Mickey Harte made an interesting admission after Saturday’s defeat of Sligo, admitting the process of phasing out his iconic players from the 2000s had been troublesome in recent years.
Yes, those veteran players lent precious experience and star talent but they weren’t always up to 70 minutes of football.
Now, however, he believes he has a young team with enough energy to go all day. It remains to be seen if the talent levels are as high as the teams of the 2000s.
One would suspect not, though players like Darren McCurry and Connor McAliskey are stepping up and taking leadership roles. Harte, as ever, believes he has a team capable of winning the All-Ireland.
Doing it for a fourth time, with basically a new team, would be easily his greatest achievement.
