The time is now for Kerry after journey back to championship finale

The Kingdom will aim to make the final step at Croke Park on Sunday.

Fri, 02 Aug, 2024 - 07:47

Eoghan Cormican

You lose and you learn.

For the Kerry ladies over the past two seasons, there hasn’t been a whole pile of losing. And yet, there has been no end of learning.

You see, it is the when and how of their losing that has precipitated the education dictating this third successive run to the concluding Sunday of action.

The 2022 run was unexpected. There was ambition, but maybe there wasn’t full belief. 2023 was not unexpected. There was belief, but not the requisite energy to match. Too much of that energy, come the decider, had already been handed over the bank counter.

2024 is a product of 2022 and 2023. 2024 is Kerry’s opportunity. They’ll not get a better one than this. If the county's 31-year wait is not ended on Sunday, it’s hard to see this team being the group that will eventually end the wait.

2024 has been all about timing. It’s what Kerry didn’t get right in 2023.

Last year was Kerry’s first back in the League’s top tier in five years. They felt they had to hit the ground running to make safe their top tier status. They did far more than hit the ground running. They won six of their seven round-robin outings and won the League final by 13 points.

Their March and April form and fitness was lifting. But it is four months down the road in mid-August when the main prize is handed out. Dublin, not for the first time under Mick Bohan, tailored their season accordingly. They emphatically took the main prize. Kerry again left empty-handed. Two successive summers of leaving Croke Park empty-handed.

You lose and you learn. Kerry had now lost twice. The learnings from those defeats mapped out their attack on 2024. It would be a delayed attack. Fitness would be built and stored. There’d be no presenting at the bank counter and no withdrawals until summer.

The League was not a priority. The Kingdom women still wound up back in the League final. Far more by “accident” than design. They didn’t retain their League crown. They didn’t care. The main prize four months down the road was their only prize.

The main prize was what they were building towards and peaking for. Not a day or match earlier.

“We timed our run last year maybe not great, got caught a bit cold by Dublin on All Ireland final day,” says joint-manager Darragh Long.

“We trained through a lot of the League this year, even through the League final and a bit of the Munster championship. We trained really, really hard to try and do something a little bit different this year, so that come where we are now, that we're not training as hard, that we have that load done, and we are able to manage it a little bit better and try to peak for game day. We think that’s benefited us.

“I definitely think since the Donegal group game (a draw in Ballybofey), which was just a little blip for us, every time we've gone out and played, we've been getting better and better. Our conditioning the last day against Armagh, I think had that game went on another ten or fifteen minutes, we would have been fine.

“We've looked really fresh the last couple of weekends and now it’s just trying to hone in on tactics. It’s keeping the girl’s as fresh as possible and hopefully there’s one more performance in us.”

Long reckons their indifference towards the league and the performances, rather than results, that spawned had ladies football observers discounting them from the race for Brendan Martin. The same as their failure to retain their Division 1 crown, they didn’t care about any conversation taking place outside of the camp.

“Outside of probably very few people, a lot of teams and a lot of people had us written off an awful lot this year, saying that we weren't clicking and weren’t consistent in the league. We still got to a League Final. We approached it a little bit differently this year trying to give girls as much game time as we can, use our panel, strengthen our panel, which I definitely think we have done.”

If Long reckoned Kerry were being written off, there was nobody writing their final opponents off simply because they were never part of the contenders conversation in the first instance. They hadn’t been to the last four in four years, five since they reached the last day.

What put Galway in the conversation and in contention was their extra-time quarter-final triumph at the home of champions Dublin.

“They’re very controlled and they use the ball very well,” noted Kerry joint-manager Declan Quill.

“They don’t give away the ball that often. They do a lot of running with the ball and they do a lot of off the shoulder stuff. Their attackers like to come out on the loop and kick scores.

“A lot of those girls have been to an All-Ireland final in 2019 with Galway. They’ve been in All-Ireland finals with their clubs and they were in the Division One final last year as well, so it’s a good experienced Galway team that we’ll be facing.”