Kerry fairer game to Dublin

The morning of last September’s All- Ireland SFC final, a newspaper ran the story of how they had unearthed Kerry’s secret code, which purported to encourage them to be sly and cunning to beat Dublin. 

It carried a photograph of a poster, alleged to have been hung in the Kerry dressing room, featuring the Spanish word “picardia”, meaning sharpness or craftiness.

The newspaper’s claim it was revealing news of the poster for the first time would have startled those who first read of it in Conor McCarthy’s Irish Examiner piece on the eve of last July’s Munster final replay. Just as the timing of that piece was interesting, so too was the re-emergence of the “picardia” claims hours before All-Ireland final.