Can Kerry stop the Dublin juggernaut?
The Oxford Dictionary defines juggernaut as ‘a huge, powerful, and overwhelming force’ and by way of explanation uses ‘the juggernaut thundered through the countryside’ as a descriptor.
Jim Gavin’s Dublin team are certainly a powerful force that has overwhelmed all opposition and everything that has been thrown at them in recent years.
The point about Dublin in this race for a place in GAA history is that they can (and have) beat you every which way they need to.
Like that juggernaut, Dublin have thundered through the countryside, winning in all the tricky provincial away venues that were supposed to a possible roadblock to a team of city slickers who struggle outside the capital.
They have also continually beaten all the top teams out there. They’ve found a way past the defensive setups of Donegal and Tyrone; the full man-on-man press and push up of the great Mayo team, continually; and the Damian Comer-inspired battering ram of Galway.
They now have this last epic challenge of confronting a team of young, up and coming, outrageously talented Kerry men.
The original masters of the game have once again reinvented themselves, something they always manage to do.
The Kingdom has now thrown up a new challenge for the Dublin brains trust to overcome.
This will be Dublin’s greatest achievement — or greatest failing. It seems apt to me that they must overcome the new, old challenge of Kerry to be deemed potentially the greatest Gaelic football team of all time. You suspect they’d want it no other way.
Last week I stumbled across a book which detailed the concept of ‘entropy’. In its simplest form, entropy can be explained by the universe’s tendency to move a system from order to disorder. The sandcastle you make on a beach will eventually be consumed by the waves coming in off the sea.
The random waves will never ‘make’ a sandcastle for you.
It will remain that way until you make something else from it, or something else takes its place.
Order becomes disorder, You can imagine this type of talk is not in Jim Gavin’s vocabulary. But if you look closer, he has already broken up Pat Gilroy’s Dublin team of the Brogans, Paul Flynn, and Diarmuid Connolly, andreplaced it with something younger, more methodical, and — dare I say — better.
The question is — can this young Kerry team supersede this all-conquering Dublin outfit? In the early years of this decade, Jim McGuinness’s Donegal machine not only adapted their tactics to suit their strengths, they seemed to rip up the playbook on how to set out a Gaelic football team.
They were eventually undone by the Kerry team of 2014 and later, by Dublin who came with a new and improved plan to beat massed defences. Jim McGuinness’s article on a plan for Tyrone last year to negate the Dublin threat by positioning all 15 players inside their own 45m was doomed to failure.
It showed one way of approaching the challenge of playing the Dubs. I don’t think anything has changed this year.
In soccer, a typical game plan is to set up your team in a compact, tight defensive formation. Especially when a minnow comes up against a giant.
The management mantra is to sit back, remain compact, throw yourself at every ball, frustrate the opposition, and then hope to snatch a 0-0 draw or even catch them on the hop with a lightning fast breakaway.
That approach has now largely been debunked. Dublin have cracked it. Packed defence will not undo the Dubs.
Kerry have already tried something different — they’ve placed their faith in youth.
Notwithstanding, some of these players are some of the most outrageously talented young players operating in the country. In David Clifford and Sean O’Shea, they possess generational talents — players who are good enough to etch their names in the history of the game.
Clifford and O’Shea remind me of so much of the likes of Colm Cooper and Declan O’Sullivan in terms of the raw abilities.
We all knew these were special talents who would go onto achieve special things in the game. And they did.
Kerry need to be so tactically flexible. In my role as London manager, we had our players going zonally on opposition team’s kickouts at times; marking man for man other times; dropping off and allowing them to have it after a fast break away; pushing up and squeezing with seven players pressing rarely; and playing cat and mouse and setting traps for the corner back to receive and then pounce on him when the moment arises.
Kick-outs need to be a range of options, from short to long to everything in between.
The point is — in the modern game — you need to follow through on a range of tactics, for different teams, and atdifferent points in a game.
You can no longer get away with being a team that goes zonally or sits back or is defensive or is all out attacking.
You are all that. And more.
You need many ingredients to achieve this team: quality intelligent players, top-class coaching, insightful analysis, bulletproof tactics, supreme conditioning but also maturity on the field of battle.
The only team that has come close to Dublin consistently over the last number of years has been Mayo. Time and again, they took the game to Dublin — man for man, but with defensive structure also.
Now the question of whether Kerry has a defence capable of hitting the heights of that excellent Mayo set will be answered this weekend; but what is without doubt is that they have greater firepower in their forward line than Mayo ever had. And that must give them hope. That and tradition.
Kerry need to give the Dublin full back line something to think about also. After seeing what Tommy Walsh is still capable of, I would play him from the beginning.
It simply does not make sense against this Dublin team to hold any trump cards back, otherwise the game could be over before you know it. Starting Walsh is the kind of left-field tactic that could perhaps throw Dublin slightly off kilter.
In soccer, this is the simple tactic of the no. 9 centre-forward ‘stretching the opposition defence’ by playing high up the pitch. I understand the counter-attacking game and it’s a good tactic, but you also need a target up there and someone to occupy the defence and make that Dublin full-back line defend.
When out of possession, Kerry must drop back a roving sweeper from their half-back line, rather than simply stationing someone back there all the time — it is too predictable and ineffective. Man-markers are needed for the awesome duo of Con O’Callaghan and Paul Mannion; which are likely to be matched by the duo of Clifford and Geaney. It may become a shoot-out between opposing sets of outrageously talented sets of forwards.
If they match each other — which is certainly possible — it may come down to the albeit seriously impressive supporting acts of Sean O’Shea and Stephen O’Brien for Kerry and Ciarán Kilkenny, Dean Rock, and Brian Howard for Dublin.
With this in mind, Dublin have the greater set of defenders to negate or at least limit the damage of the opposition forwards. David Moran needs a game for the ages in midfield with the potential support of Jack Barry, if they are to come out on top.
It is so strange to see the odds stacked against Kerry in this final. But as we all know, if there is any team to make a fool out of predictions and to find a way, it is Kerry.
But I’m not sure if all that tradition and all that know-how will be enough. Dublin are simply too good. They have too many match winners around the field and too many contingency plans in place if things are going against them.
Mannion, O’Callaghan, and Niall Scully are proven goalscorers, Jack McCaffrey and James McCarthy are machines attacking from deep. At midfield, the best footballer in the country, Brian Fenton, is the conductor in chief.
I am going to go with a four-point winning scoreline in a relatively high scoring game of Dublin 2-16 Kerry 1-15. I’ll add one qualification — if the day is wet or Clifford bags an early goal or two, then Kerry have got a real chance. Otherwise, the Dublin juggernaut will keep rolling on…
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