Seismic Saturday assured in Killarney

By Joel Slattery

Whavever the mathematics in Fitzgerald Stadium this evening, a seismic 70 minutes for Kerry football is assured in Killarney.

Beat Kildare, and the prospect of an All-Ireland semi-final with Dublin looms. Lose, and... well that does not bear thinking about for Eamonn Fitzmaurice and his Kerry project: A quarter-final exit for the first time since 2012.

A victory over Cian O’Neill may not prove enough, but without it, the post-mortems could be long and ugly. Fitzmaurice insists that the blinkers will be tightly worn by his charges against Kildare.

Control the controllables.

“That’s the situation we have put ourselves in,” Kingdom manager Éamonn Fitzmaurice acknowledged.

“I’m delighted that we are still there and we can still fight for an All-Ireland semi-final. The thought of a dead-rubber game in Killarney wouldn’t have been very nice.

“So we are still fighting for that All-Ireland semi-final spot. To get there we have to win in Killarney and we need things to go our way in Salthill, but that’s completely outside our control, so we just have to let that play itself out.

"We have to make sure we win our game and take it from there then.”

While the situation of needing other results to go their way is one that hasn’t been seen in the football championship before, Kerry can draw on the experience of last year’s league, in which they had to win a game and keep an eye on scorelines from around the country.

That day, they needed Donegal and Monaghan to be beaten and ensure their score difference was superior to the Ulster pair as well as Mayo.

It’s not so complicated this time. That said, the manager isn’t looking too far ahead, he is focused on the task at hand.

“It doesn’t change the dynamic,” he said of needing a win, and a five-point turnaround to reach the semi-final. “If you start thinking about things like that, you take your eye off the ball.

“We have to make sure we win the game and, of course, if you are in a position where you can win by a few points, you want to push on and do that,” he added, drawing on the experience of the finale of the 2017 National Football League group stage.

“We were in a similar position last year facing into our last league game against Tyrone and outside of the group, there didn’t seem to be any awareness really of the fact that there was a massive chance that we could get into the league final,” Fitzmaurice revealed.

But we knew within the group ourselves that if we won, and other results that were probably going to go a certain way, we could get into the league final and again it was going to come down to scoring difference and if we did need to win by ‘X’ amount of points but we didn’t think about that.

For Fitzmaurice, the key is to just get the win over Cian O’Neill’s Kildare. After that, they will let the chips fall where they may.

“Our thing was go out, play well, win and see where that takes us and we had a good win in that game in Killarney and it got us into the league final afterwards.

“I think we’ll probably have someone keeping an eye on it, but for the players in particular, it’s about going out, win the game and if a situation like that (looking to make up score difference) materialises late on, then you can get in the word.

“If you start thinking about things like that beforehand, you are taking your eye off the ball and we have enough to be doing to make sure that we get back to where we were for the Munster final and play with that kind of work-rate and accuracy. We need to get back to that again.”

While Kerry need to return to the type of performance that saw them blow away Cork in Páirc Uí Chaoimh seven weeks ago, their form has dipped since the provincial final and the Kingdom have to find out how to rectify the performances issues.

“We haven’t quite clicked,” Fitzmaurice acknowledges. “We’re not far away, I think we came on a good bit above in Clones, [but] still didn’t play as well as we can play.

“I would hope that we’d play better again [this evening], I don’t have the answer why we didn’t show up for the Galway game.

"We reacted well last week for Monaghan, especially bearing in mind we came off such a poor performance. It can be hard to go from that to playing the way we played in the Munster final.

“Everyone is doing what’s being asked of them, everyone is working very hard and we are very close so we just have to keep going.”

While their opponents may only be playing for pride, Fitzmaurice knows that Kildare are not coming to Killarney just to make up the numbers.

“First of all, so far in the Super 8s, they’ve been quite unlucky, both games have been very tight. I think the Daniel Flynn (sending off) incident was a huge moment in the game and even after that they kept fighting back and fighting back,” he said.

“In fairness, Galway chipped on the few points at the end to see it out.

“I’m expecting a huge challenge from them.

"I think they are playing for pride themselves and they’re probably going to be playing with a bit of freedom and abandon in the fact that they have nothing to lose, as such, and I know Cian well and he is a competitive man, he is not going to be coming down to make it easy for us, he’s going to want to win the game.”