Mike Quirke: Kerry running to a standstill

In a football coaching context, the scientific literature suggests that mistakes made in games or training can be used as a powerful tool, and offer the coach the opportunity to promote real learning amongst the players. The inventor of the electric light bulb, Thomas Edison, once said: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work”.

For the last two weekends, Mayo, and Kerry, in particular, might have come close to finding that number of things that don’t work, but unlike Edison, they have yet to find the light.

Kerry are exactly where I thought they would be after a mere seven training sessions on flooded pitches in early February. They are nowhere, caught in a limbo-like state somewhere between a lack of fitness, short of bodies and bereft of ideas. Everybody must share that collective responsibility for poor performance; players and management alike, and both were being subjected to whispers of discontent on the way out of Killarney last Sunday. Eamonn Fitzmaurice’s infallibility had an expiry date apparently— at least in the eyes of some of the more fickle of the terrace cogniscenti.