Cluxton, Cooper, Clifford: If this isn't the greatest football team of the last 25 years . . .

With the first quarter of the century now behind us, we set Kieran Shannon the task of picking the finest fifteen in the game of Gaelic football from 2000-2024. No easy task...

OUT ON THEIR OWN: Kerry great Colm Cooper is selected as the playmaking eleven on our team.

IT'S one thing picking a team of the year, even a team of the decade. But one spanning quarter of a century? To make the cut you’d to be bordering on being an institution, someone we could envisage a statue of outside your county grounds.

And to be the corner back or corner forward on a select like this, you needed to have been able to play elsewhere than just corner back or corner forward. This is 21st century football, people, not 1989 or even 1999 when players hardly moved out of their box in the grid. Remember all the commotion when Páidí moved Seámus Moynihan to full back in 2000? Almost everyone was sceptical because he wasn’t a specialist number three like Darren Fay. But what Páidí recognised was that Moynihan was more versatile than Fay or almost anyone else. He wasn’t so much confining his most complete footballer to the edge of the square as allowing him master yet another position – primarily to help Kerry win, naturally.