Dara Ó Cinnéide: Michael Murphy can expose Kerry flaws

Big day in Tralee. Big day for the town. Big day for the Kerry hurlers. Just as big for the footballers, says Dara Ó Cinnéide.

Given its North Kerry hinterland, Austin Stack Park has long been acknowledged as the home of hurling in Kerry, but many of the footballers will probably admit privately that they would prefer to play their league games in Killarney.

Since its last overhaul in 1994, Kerry players have always had a curious relationship with the Tralee venue. Nobody ever disputed that it was the true home of Kerry GAA. Nor would Tralee ever come second best in terms of history, heritage and sporting memories. It has been the default venue for most county football finals and, at this time of the year, it always seems capable of mustering a better atmosphere than what you might get on the sparsely populated terrace in Fitzgerald Stadium.

Yet the players still prefer Killarney. That’s mostly due to the playing surface but also because Tralee is about the plod of league in winter and spring, whereas Killarney brings to mind top-of-the-ground championship football, summer training with the smell of fresh-cut-grass.

All such notions and associations may as well be tossed aside by the Kerry players after the Roscommon game in Fitzgerald Stadium last month. It was wet and dreary; a typical league dogfight.

Kerry looked ill-prepared for the scrap and lost two valuable league points and yet again the NFL became a game of survival for Éamonn Fitzmaurice and his charges.

Tomorrow’s game against Donegal is the first proper gut-check Kerry will get after completing their first block of training in the past few weeks. We can disregard the canter against Down last weekend in The Marshes.

So the ever-demanding Kerry public will come to Tralee tomorrow and they will expect. They will expect better than what they saw in Killarney a month ago and they certainly expect Kerry to be better than the last time they saw them in the old Austin Stack Park, against Monaghan in March last year.

Incidentally, the Farney win that day was their first against Kerry in Tralee since 1988 and Donegal arrive hoping for a similar result tomorrow. From a Donegal viewpoint, it would be nice to have eight-league points heading northward having recorded a first win away to Kerry since before some of the team were even born.

Kerry should be vivified by the challenge involved in extending that unbeaten record and if that doesn’t do it, then the feel of a new sod and the home improvement work around the ground should be enough extract a much improved performance from the Kingdom.

Donegal, too, will be looking forward to this one. Why wouldn’t they? No team has looked as dynamic and as composed in the early stages of this year’s campaign. All the vital statistics speak of a team at home with itself again. A bizarre match in Páirc Uí Rinn last weekend ensures that only Roscommon have scored more and, as usual, no team has conceded fewer scores. That’s the type of form that has them on top of the table along with perennial league standard bearers, Dublin, on six points. And that’s the type of form that brought well over 11,000 people to Ballybofey last Sunday, the biggest ever crowd for a league match in Donegal.

Last weekend’s joust with Mayo was a hell of a game of football.

Watching Rory Kavanagh taking the ball on an overlap off Ryan McHugh’s shoulder in the 71st minute tells us much about Donegal veteran’s enthusiasm and fitness. Leo McLoone’s game-changing goal after a battalion of Donegal players attacked the central spine of Mayo’s defence in a bewildering weaving movement in the 57th minute was equally impressive.

But perhaps the most compelling feature of the Donegal display was their ability to make light of the fact that they were absolutely cleaned out on what had in recent years become one of the key elements of their game — the securing of possession from kick-outs.

Even though they won just a third of their own and barely a fifth of the opposition kick-outs, Donegal still won.

Paul Durcan’s ‘no-look’ kickout has been one of this team’s biggest assets for over a decade. If Durcan is to walk away after the club final on St Patrick’s Day his replacement, Peter Boyle, and his kick-out targets will appreciate the extra bit of space at the end of this year’s league campaign to help them arrive at a mutual understanding.

The absence of a kick-out strategy was one of the few flaws in Donegal’s game last weekend and Kerry could and should target that weakness.

The main reason Donegal were able to get by on midfield scraps was that Mayo simply couldn’t cope with the incessant running of Paddy McGrath, Ryan and Eoin McHugh and the aforementioned Kavanagh.

If a renowned running team like Mayo struggled with them, you’d have to wonder how Kerry might hope to counteract those key Donegal players, especially after the processional nature of the Down game.

And yet, Kerry are not without a chance. It was obvious from the Mayo game last weekend that the likes of Hugh McFadden, Ryan McHugh, Eoin McHugh and Frank McGlynn, for all their positive attributes, much prefer to be bombing forward rather than being asked to defend.

The McGee brothers got sucked into some needless fouling too, and if there is a repeat tomorrow, Bryan Sheehan could once again highlight the value of having a tried and trusted free-taker in league football.

Michael Murphy, of course, is one such player and it would frustrate Kerry if, having taken care of other aspects of the Donegal attacking threat, they were to cough up free kicks within the range of the big Glenswilly man. Murphy has, by necessity, spent much of the last three league games to date out the field, but 12 of his 14 points so far have come from placed balls, many of them spectacular long range efforts.

It would be just like him to sense the vulnerability in the Kerry full back line tomorrow, plonk himself at the edge of the square and cut loose.

Either way, the challenge presented by Murphy and other in-form Donegal players affords Kerry football a very welcome chance to measure where exactly it stands heading into an exciting period in the history of Austin Stack Park.

On Wednesday, the Under 21 team will play Tipperary under the new floodlights and with trips away to Mayo and to Monaghan before a return to Tralee to play Cork in a month’s time, the senior team’s performances over the coming days and weeks should be illuminating too.

Despite the gloomy predictions of many, I fancy Kerry to make home improvement count tomorrow.