Tony Leen: For another autumn autopsy, Kerry should not ignore the elephant in the room
DESPAIR: Kerry's Sean O'Shea at the full-time whistle in Croke Park. Pic: Leah Scholes, Inpho.
THE AFTERMATH dripped with stats and factoids, few of which are admissible in the ongoing oddity of Kerry’s too frequent inability to close out tight games.
Going back to the same Armagh opposition in 2002 (not mentioning what happened 20 years before that…), Kerry folk have gobbled up a lot of winters wondering how did they let another one slip away. One of them (2008, Tyrone, Tommy McGuigan) even had a similarly decisive, if jammy, goal for the opposition, trickling into the Canal End goal.
After another big short on Saturday in Croke Park, Jack O’Connor submitted that Barry McCambridge’s fortuitous Armagh goal, Kerry’s own butchered chances early in the second period, and the heaving sea of Orchard orange around the ground as exhibits for the defence. Each had their legitimacy. Nonetheless, from winning, dominant positions, few could really dispute that Kerry have misplaced that once-ruthless competency to put manners on the opposition, to render an upstart rising stillborn.
The why and the how are certain to be scrutinised again in the wake of this semi-final loss. The when? One could take post-2009 as an approximate start point, the evidence mounted quicker thereafter, though it's worth mentioning 2014 and 2022 as rebuttals.
This time they got drawn into an anaconda’s pit. Kerry went five up in the 47th minute and were comfortable, without being overtly superior. For the next fifty minutes of so, they added 0-5. That’s a score every ten minutes.
O’Connor and his players had to be aware that in the pantheon on grinders who don’t take a knee, Kieran McGeeney and the decade he has spent inculcating his players with the spartan values he espouses, were the . For anyone who hasn’t seen McGeeney’s speech to a student group fifteen years ago about the Spartans and the Battle of Thermopylae, it is worth a rummage through the internet, but the nub of it is here.
“What I took from it, more than anything else, was their motto — come home with your shield or upon it. The Spartans were renowned as the greatest fighting army in the world and they carried their shield in their left hand with their spear in their right.
“They carried their shield in their left hand, because they protected the man beside them. And that was their sole focus in battle: it was to make sure that the man beside them survived. And it was through that, that they became the most invincible army in the world, because they were always willing to make sure that the man beside them was better looked after than themselves.
“I sort of thought to myself, if a team can think that way - and as an individual I was always very personally driven - I said to myself: 'My job, really, on the football field, should be to make everyone beside me look better than I do.' And it was through that philosophy that my own football started to flourish, and we tried to build it through the Armagh team.”
Eventually, they did.
None of this is to suggest that Kerry players do not look out for the man alongside. That would be nonsensical. But McGeeney knew it, and if he didn’t, Kieran Donaghy was alongside the reassure him. Hang onto these boys for an hour and take our chances down the stretch. Kerry tend to tighten up.
No less a philosopher than Con Houlihan once ridiculed the notion that the mountains and seas in Kerry were responsible for the soaring excellence of their football. If that was the benchmark, the flat plains of Kildare would never have turned out a player.
But for all the harsh Atlantic winters and saturated springs, Kerry’s historical pre-eminence in the Gaelic football arena has often meant they have relied less on grunt and grind. When you’re taking shallow breaths, these things make a difference. It was notable as O’Connor rang the changes towards the end and into extra time that Kerry looked rather callow and lacking in leaders. Or fir láidir, as a Ventry man would say. It might be a stretch to say they looked rudderless, though not by much.
Twenty two years ago, we stood in the corridor underneath the Cusack Stand of Croke Park, seeking logic from Paidi Ó Sé after Kerry lost an All-Ireland they should have won to McGeeney and Armagh. He used the word ‘culture’ more than once. Tangentially he did a tour of military metaphors around the life and strife of living in Crossmaglen at the time, of British troops and helicopters, of intimidation and insurrection. At the time, I felt it was nonsense and diversionary, but now I’m not so sure he wasn’t at least a bit right.
Armagh brought a store of historical and emotional fuel with them to Dublin at the weekend. It was certain to burn bright if ignited. Kerry held out a match to them.
In its aftermath McGeeney accentuated his fascination with Kerry football rather than dwell on their own long, hard winters. “The one thing I have always loved about playing against Kerry is it’s always full on. They are all in. There's no back doors with them and I like that. I like the way they play football. It is very aggressive, nobody ever talks about their aggressive streak. It sounds derogatory but it's not. I think that's how you play at this level.”
It’s not their stomach for the 50-50s that catches Kerry short. Nor their defensive proficiency. In the first period, many Kerry players delivered textbook examples of the turnover and the defensive swarm. But as their profligacy increased, so too did physical fatigue and psychological doubt. Legs began wobbling.
For sure, the current championship structure rarely gives Kerry a pre-Croke Park gut-check their championship challenge demands. For all the sports science and periodisation they have honed (remember, Kerry had the ideal game-every-two-weeks schedule), they were not truly braced for McGeeney’s Armagh down the stretch Saturday. The irony of Ulster lads scoffing enviously on ‘The Sunday Game’ at Kerry’s facile run to the knockout stages wafts around them in the Montrose studio.
While the post-mortem is contemplating how to manage that better, Tony Griffin can lead the internal audit on why Kerry keep blinking when the fat’s in the fire. O’Connor was of the view that they were getting over the hang-up. He said so himself in April after beating Cork, the first time I’ve publicly heard him address the issue, albeit briefly.
“Fellas showed their experience, that they had been there before, and were relatively comfortable in a two or three-point game, which is a change for us. Traditionally, Kerry haven’t been great in tight games.”
There has been some interesting insight published during Euro 2024 on England’s old failings from the penalty spot. A study interviewing those who took spot kicks in a shoot-out between Netherlands and Sweden at Euro 2004 found that those who felt the result was down to luck were more likely to have destructive interpretations of anxiety - and ultimately more likely to miss - than those who believed that it was down to skill. Gareth Southgate, Steve Holland and their coaching colleagues have long since embraced the importance of penalty proficiency being the first step towards being better at them.
Of course at a more fundamental level, O’Connor will lament the modest form of his leading forwards, the two Cliffords and Sean O’Shea all season – and of Dara Moynihan and Paul Geaney on Saturday. They might have finished with 1-16 but Kerry kicked 14 wides in the semi-final and had a conversion rate from play of a mere 38%, though to be fair, that is an outlier on their championship journey.
O’Connor and his management team have another season at the helm if they want it, though it possibly needs a new voice. I’d be surprised if Paddy Tally continues to trek down from the north for a fourth season, so there may be a new coach.
Irrespective, it is also time for Kerry to set David Clifford on a new course. Perhaps on the forty. He got some poking on Saturday from his markers though there was seldom the sense that Kerry were going to start a row over it. Maybe they were right. There should be changes elsewhere in attack too - and midfield still needs more onion.
Kerry failed to score in the first period of extra time at Croke Park, by which point they had surrendered the lead and the psychological controls. Now we were in Armagh time, the clock working orange. Kerry had retreated into their past with high seas and mountainous terrain.
I went searching for a text message on my phone afterwards. ‘Culture is such a delicate thing, yet it can give you the strength to topples countries. Once it means something, it can take you anywhere.’ Anywhere.
Sent by a spartan.
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