Christy O'Connor: Can David Clifford do what nobody has done since Jacko?

PLAYER OF THE YEAR?:Kerry’s Tadhg Morley, David Clifford and Tom O'Sullivan celebrate after the semi-final. Pic Credit ©INPHO/James Crombie
A couple of months after the 2017 All-Ireland hurling final, Austin Gleeson gave a revealing interview about his season.
Waterford had reached the All-Ireland final but the year was a struggle for him, even if it didn’t always appear to be; Gleeson got five points in the qualifier against Kilkenny, along with 1-2 in the All-Ireland semi-final against Cork, with the goal being the score of the season.
Yet he was kept scoreless in the final, which, for Gleeson, encapsulated his year. It was the first time Gleeson had failed to score in a championship match. Waterford’s hopes had hung heavily on his shoulders but Gleeson had felt that burden all year, particularly after winning Hurler of the Year in 2016. To boot, he also won Young Hurler of the Year, becoming only the second player in history to secure both awards after Tony Kelly managed it in 2013.
That new status had definitely infiltrated Gleeson’s thought process. “I was trying to live up to the awards the whole time,” he said at the end of 2017.
“That’s what was going through my head. People were saying to me, ‘Leave 2016 where it is.’ But going through my head was: ‘I have the awards so I have to perform.’ It didn’t help. I put myself under way too much pressure and it was affecting my hurling.”
Expectations are bound to change, especially for young players winning that award. The easy excuse for the public is to blame awards and the pressure it can place on them. In Gleeson’s defence, he was more exposed because his team didn’t win the All-Ireland; in the history of the awards, only six players won in it in a season when their county didn’t win the All-Ireland; Christy Ring, Tony Doran, Brian Corcoran, Tony Browne, Dan Shanahan and Gleeson.
The All-Ireland winning team normally has a plethora of award winners, which dilutes some of the focus on the Player of the Year if they are part of that successful team. So does that expectation from a Player of the Year from a county that didn’t win the All-Ireland make it harder again to reproduce that same form the following year?
The All-Stars weren’t there in Ring’s time but none of those other five Hurler of the Year recipients won All-Stars the following year. In Corcoran and Browne’s defence, Corcoran only played one championship match the following season in 1993, while Browne played just two games in 1999, when he was also dealing with a serious ankle injury.
Looking at the other numbers across the board though, of the last 30 recipients of the Hurler of the Year, 15 were All-Stars again the following year, with Henry Shefflin managing to win All-Stars in two of his three post Hurler of the Year seasons.
So how do the numbers compare in football? While a hurler has never won the award two years in succession, three players have managed it in football, on four occasions; Jack O’Shea (Kerry), who did it twice in 1980-’81 and 1984-‘85, Jimmy Keaveney (Dublin) in 1976-’77 and James McCartan Snr (Down) in 1960-‘61.
However, the overall Footballer of the Year numbers compared to the hurling are startling when their performances in the following year are assessed; in the 38 years since O’Shea last won the award, there have only been five subsequent FOTY winners who managed to win an All-Star the following season; Brian Stafford (Meath), Peter Canavan (Tyrone), Colm Cooper (Kerry), Bernard Brogan and Brian Fenton (Dublin).
In defence of a number of those winners, many only got one or two games the following season when it was a knockout championship. Yet, the Footballer of the Year has certainly been more of a curse in football than it has long perceived to have been in hurling. Kieran McGeary’s struggles with his form for Tyrone since winning the award in 2021 is just one example.
The big question now is can David Clifford finally be the player to break that curse and win back-to-back awards? If any modern player is cut out to do so, it’s Clifford, who is the odds on favourite with the bookies, followed by James McCarthy and Brian Fenton.
Even if Kerry don’t win, a solid performance should still see Clifford scoop the award. McCarthy has a 33% chance with the bookies but if Dublin win, and Clifford is held, a top-rate performance from McCarthy could see him muscle in and be named Footballer of the Year.
However, if Dublin win, Clifford is held, McCarthy plays decent and Fenton gives an exhibition, could the Raheny man - who currently only has a 10% chance with the bookies - sprint in from the outside lane to win a third FOTY in six years?
That would be some story.

On Colm Parkinson’s excellent
GAA podcast this week, Aaron Kernan felt that Kerry would be a far more confident outfit going in against Dublin this year than they had been before the same fixture last year.“Kerry will have more self-belief because they’ve been there now, they’ve done it,” said Kernan. “These boys will thrive on the pressure that’s going to come on them this weekend.”
At least Kerry know what it’s like now to beat Dublin, something they couldn’t do throughout the last decade. On the other hand, the vast majority of these Dublin players know better than anyone what it’s like to beat Kerry. And to get inside their heads.
During Dublin’s relentless crusade under Jim Gavin, Kerry rattled Dublin four times, but not being able to beat them raised the question as to whether Kerry were spooked by Dublin.
“You’d have to say that Dublin did get into Kerry’s heads,” said former Kerry player Seán O’Sullivan last year. "Dublin were well ahead of us and, say what you like, we don’t like that down here. I wouldn’t say it kept us awake at night. But Dublin were always in our heads.”
Was it that black and white either? That definition has multiple meanings. Dublin had to be in Kerry’s heads because they put so much focus and effort into trying to take them down. Dublin were in Kerry’s heads in terms of their determination to try and get to their level.
“In terms of us being cowed by them or anything like that, definitely not,” said Éamonn Fitzmaurice last year. “Every time we went up against them in championship, we went out to win. And we felt we could win.”
It was still only natural for Dublin to believe that Kerry had a psychological hang-up with them after five successive championship defeats in nine seasons. From Dublin’s perspective, their dominance also inflated the perception of there being a pressure on Kerry that they had historically never faced, or felt before against the Dubs.
Kerry may be All-Ireland champions again. They may have far more confidence going into this fixture than they would have had in the past, but this is a different Dublin team than last year, loaded with far more All-Ireland winners than Kerry.
They may no longer carry the same aura as they used to but, deep down, Dublin will still believe that they can get into Kerry’s heads and spook them.
Again.
A couple of weeks after the 2011 All-Ireland final, Jack O’Connor was in Listowel coaching kids when he met an old gentleman in the community centre. O’Connor had a sense of dread as the man approached because he had the look of someone searching for a spark in cooling embers.
The two started talking but the engagement was brief. The man told O’Connor that he had been in a pub the previous evening when a re-run of the All-Ireland final came on. He drank his pint and walked out.
The experience offered O’Connor a measure of his own feelings. An old man from North Kerry, someone with absolutely no connection or contact with the team or management was still clearly hurting from Kerry’s All-Ireland final defeat. It almost justified the devastation that was still tearing O’Connor apart.
“I’d say there was no emotion ever invented that I didn’t go through afterwards,” recalled O’Connor in April 2012. “It was like I was in a daze for three or four months. There is no other way out of it. It just hurts so much, especially in Kerry. You try and put on a brave face but you’re dying inside. People talk about winning All-Irelands but it’s the ones you lose that really stick in the memory. And it’s even more devastating when we played well enough to win.”
O’Connor had lost an All-Ireland final before in 2005 to Tyrone, when another defeat to an Ulster side was an additional scar on Kerry’s soul. The nature and background of an All-Ireland final defeat never siphons the pain but it felt different in 2011 because of the acute manner in which Kerry lost. They had control of the game before surrendering it and never getting that initiative back. And the pain always goes deeper when it’s an All-Ireland final defeat to Dublin.
It was all the more galling again for O’Connor considering his record then, and now, against the Dubs. In four championship matches, that 2011 final was the only game O’Connor’s side lost. In eight league games, O’Connor has only lost to Dublin twice.
O’Connor did also lose a championship match to Dublin as Kildare manager. When O’Connor was interviewed by RTÉ shortly after the 2021 Leinster final, he was clearly disappointed but circumspect in the wake of an eight-point defeat, claiming that at least Kildare had produced part of “the blueprint” required to take Dublin down.
That commentary wouldn’t have been acceptable as Kerry manager but it was considering where Kildare had come from, having been annihilated by Meath in the second half of the previous year’s Leinster semi-final when Meath scored five goals. And particularly when Dublin had been hammering everyone in Leinster for years.
In O’Connor’s head, he has always felt he has had the blueprint required to take Dublin down. But he also knows how difficult that is. And how painful it can be if it doesn’t work out. Especially in an All-Ireland final.