Dublin-Kerry: Undoubtedly the most-anticipated fixture of 2022

Dublin-Kerry only disappoints when they don’t meet. Anytime they both turn up for real, there is only one show in town, on earth, you want to watch, writes Kieran Shannon

BLOCKBUSTER: Kerry wunderkind David Clifford looks to wriggle free of Jonny Cooper of Dublin in the memorable drawn All-Ireland 2019 final at Croke Park. Pic: David Fitzgerald, Sportsfile

Although Mayo folk might disagree at this stage, it would seem it’s more of an anti-climax to lose an All-Ireland semi-final than a final.

Reaching the last game of the year is an achievement in itself, its lead-up a sort of honeymoon where the eventual loser is profiled and lauded in as flattering terms as his eventual conqueror. You’re either some man to have got your team this far or some man to have got them back to this point. Either immortality or redemption, possibly even both, beckons.

Redemption will be a big theme within and circling both the Dublin and Kerry camps in 2022 after where and how they bowed out in 2021. From the opening water break of the national league, by which time David Clifford & Co had already annihilated Galway, no one could see any other All-Ireland final pairing, only for neither of them to make it as they both melted when Mayo and Tyrone turned up the heat in extra-time of their respective semi-finals.

You can take it so that reaching a final is an absolute baseline for both teams in 2022. Jack O’Connor, after seeing the fate that befell Peter Keane, knows the brief he has been given: as he’d acknowledge when doing the round of interviews upon his appointment, in Kerry there is only one criterion by which you’re measured. Likewise, it’s hard to see Dessie Farrell surviving or wanting another season if he were to go a second consecutive season without winning an All Ireland, or at least without reaching one.

And yet in all probability, at least one of them won’t make it to Sunday, July 24, the day of the 2022 All-Ireland football final.

Though the bookies’ odds suggest this All-Ireland is effectively a two-horse race, with both Dublin and Kerry 6/4 to win it all and Tyrone and Mayo the best of the rest all the way back at 9/1, the two best teams in the country — or at least the two most-fancied – cannot meet in the last game of the year.

It’s the way the draw falls. As everyone learns — but often forgets — at some stage, the All-Ireland semi-final pairings rotate over a three-year cycle. One year the Munster champions play the Connacht champions, like Tipperary faced Mayo in 2020. The next year then they encounter the Ulster champions, as Kerry did in 2021. The third year then they’re due to play against the Leinster champions. Which means, assuming both parties navigate their provinces and the All-Ireland quarter-final stage which thankfully returns in 2022, Dublin and Kerry should collide on Sunday, July 10.

Of course, it’s not a given. Kerry didn’t make it out of Munster two years ago. You’ve to go back to the pre-Jim Gavin era for when the gap between Dublin and the rest of Leinster was as narrow. And with the return of the All-Ireland quarter-final stage and the advent of the Tailteann Cup removing any fodder in the qualifiers, it’s very possible your last-eight opponent could be a hardened Ulster team — possibly even Tyrone — or the loser of the first-round Connacht death-match between Mayo and Galway.

But say what you will about Dublin and Kerry — like that they have an awful habit between them of not delivering us the Consensus All-Ireland final that we’ve yearned — they tend not to leave us go a third season without them meeting in the championship. Whenever they’re due to meet in a semi-final, like in 2007, 2013, 2016, they invariably meet, and in the process offered up stone-cold classics.

In our attempts to credit and capture the uniqueness and brilliance of the Mayo team of the past decade and their rivalry with Dublin, we can sometimes underplay the contribution of Kerry during that period, as odd as it might seem to suggest Dublin-Kerry is under-hyped. But the truth is over the last decade we’ve had a tremendous triumvirate, albeit with one towering over the other two, that between them have served up a regularity of top-class games that no other trio — not even the magnificent Kerry-Tyrone-Armagh axis of the noughties — has matched.

Take the rivalry that is very much third in that triangle. Kerry-Mayo gave us Limerick 2014, a game for the ages yet only marginally more epic than the game they conjured six days earlier in Croke Park, as well as another gripping drawn semi-final and replay saga in 2017. And that’s not mentioning the best occasion the Super 8s served up, when 32,000 crammed into Fitzgerald Stadium to see David Moran square up to Aidan O’Shea only months after a five-goal league final between the pair produced the sight of Mayo greats finally parading national silverware around Croke Park.

By virtue of the sheer number of All-Ireland finals and epics they’ve met in, Dublin-Mayo has to be the rivalry of the past decade, but in our eyes, it only marginally edges Dublin-Kerry. No stage is more likely to deliver a top game of Gaelic football than the All-Ireland semi-final round — for 20 years straight now it’s tended to produce at least one cracker — yet possibly the top two of them all were the 2013 and 2016 encounters between Dublin and Kerry.

Football — sport — simply doesn’t get better.

It can equal it though, like the matches in 2019 the same two counties served up on the All-Ireland final stage. In his autobiography, the onlooking Bernard Brogan, having won his way back onto the Dublin match-day 26, would consider the first half of the replay “as perfect a half of football as there’s ever been”; at that point Dublin had yet to register a wide, all 10 of their points had come from play — and still they were only level. The second half then would deliver history — Eoin Murchin, the five in a row and all that — and yet the first game was probably even more glorious. Dublin-Kerry only disappoint when they don’t meet. Anytime they both show up for the showdown there is only one show in town, on earth, you want to watch.

It will likely be the same on July 10 (the other All-Ireland semi-final is down for the previous day, but its curtain-raiser will be the inaugural Tailteann Cup final — Dublin-Kerry you can take it will be a standalone). The Wimbledon final might be on the same afternoon, the kind of fixture that normally clashes with a Munster or Leinster final, but even if it’s Djokovic and Nadal or Federer that are slugging it out on Centre Court at that time, it can hardly be as compelling as another shootout between Con and Clifford.

Dublin will be a markedly different team than the one that last suited up against Kerry in championship. Dublin probably edged that encounter on the back of the strength of their bench: from halftime onwards they were able to bring on Diarmuid Connolly, Philly McMahon, Cormac Costello, Cian O’Sullivan, Kevin McManamon and Michael Darragh MacAuley as well as keep Brogan, Paddy Andrews and Darren Daly in reserve. Of the aforementioned nine, all bar Costello have subsequently retired. And that’s not to mention the likely unavailability of then starters like Cluxton, McCaffrey and Mannion.

But Farrell can live with that.

All he’s interested in is that his team is markedly different to the one that played in last year’s All Ireland semi-final: that it is fresher, hungrier, deeper — and Dessier. That’s his brief, that’s his gig: to break from the team Jim built as much as Gavin did from the one Gilroy handed over.

Kerry will be different too.

Jack O’Connor has a habit of identifying — and selecting and championing — the kind of player Kerry has been lacking in Sam-free years: Aidan O’Mahony and Paul Galvin were catapulted into the starting lineup in 2004, being exactly the kind of streetfighters the county could have done with when they were shoved around by Meath, Armagh and Tyrone in Páidí’s final years.

There has been a considerable amount of commentary, bordering on lamenting, on the quality and nature of the recent Kerry championship, but you won’t find O’Connor joining in that chorus: he has enough sharpshooters as it is, it’s stoppers he’s been on the lookout for.

While it may not have been the championship the public or at least the purists wanted, in all likelihood Kerry got the championship and champions it needed.

On top of the defensive pragmatism Paddy Tally will no doubt bring to the coaching ticket, Austin Stacks in recent months have given masterclasses in the tenets of smart, hard defensive play which should not be lost on the county setup. In Dylan Casey, they have a player that looks readymade to slot into the county fullback line, just as neighbours and intermediate champions Na Gaeil have too in the form of AFL returnee Stefan Okunbor. In 2022, Kerry should have both the necessary defensive personnel and system to win again in Croke Park.

The last time headquarters was full was for the 2019 All-Ireland final replay between Dublin and Kerry. We didn’t know it at the time but Covid was only six months away. We could never have imagined that the 2020 final would be played in an empty Croke Park.

But surely it’s not too bold to dream of a full house in Croke Park again, even in these testing days, and the day it would be most fitting and likely. Upon the announcement of the latest bout of restrictions, Tanaiste Leo Varadkar spoke about wanting to make it up to the young people of Ireland in the summer of 2022. He probably had open-air concerts and festivals in mind, the likes of which he has attended himself in the past year, but dare we say he should be pushing for and envisaging a full Croker at the height of the summer too.

Because everyone, young and old, hurling snobs or big-ball folk, loves Dublin-Kerry, and the more of us that can see it in the flesh, the better.

We’ll have waited for it long enough.