Maurice Fitzgerald: David Clifford, Kerry supporters and a never-ending grá for Gaelic football
KINGDOM LEGEND: Former Kerry footballer Maurice Fitzgerald poses for a portrait at the launch of the Munster GAA Senior Hurling and Football Championships. Pic: Brendan Moran/Sportsfile
Head in Lewis Road and open gates on either side beckon you in to the centre of the pitch. Back out towards Limerick, where the lights of Kerry’s Currans Centre of Excellence show the way.
This is football country. A legend walks the land and is at home.
Maurice Fitzgerald strides across the grounds in Muckross House a little after Kerry captain Gavin White tips back out the road to St Brendan’s College where he teaches. It is all around them, this infatuated kingdom.
In green and gold, Fitzgerald personified flamboyance and skill and pure passion. It never left him.
Of course, the 56-year-old is enthused by most of the new rules. But it is not like he is necessarily yearning to have played under them.
“Anybody would want to play any Sunday,” he says as though it is the most obvious statement in the world. The richest pleasure known to any mortal and all the gods, kicking ball.
“Any day that you could play would be a great day. When you’re asking the question, we loved when we played, would love to think we could play now and I love watching the best teams competing and the best players competing.
“I think maybe bringing the contest back more. We had a lot of team defending, trying to get back to that competitiveness of yourself and your man. Maybe that is being a traditionalist. I like that contest.
"But I suppose you are going to end up with numbers back anyway, aren’t you? To answer your question, I’d love it now but I loved when we were involved as well.”
It is an unwavering affection. He elegantly sidesteps the opportunity to slate what his lifelong companion had become. Would you really like to have played in recent years? What about the Kerry versus Derry drab quarter-final of 2024?
“Then if I were to say to you, I watched the Crokes and Errigal Ciaran semi, I don’t know was there a finer game in the last 12 months and that was the traditional game.
“I just thought it was amazing. I thought it was a fantastic contest between two teams who were just emptying themselves into it. I was looking for a Kerry victory but it was a ferocious contest with all of the best parts of the game and sometimes I think when teams are free and they just go after it, you get this incredible gift.”
The Caherciveen native emerged as a boy wonder. It is what he was reared for. His father Ned represented Kerry and struck up a friendship with fellow Mount Rushmore contender Mick O’Connell.
After his playing career, he returned to the senior outfit as selector alongside Peter Keane, having been the current Clare boss’s best man. He relished that challenge. This sport always found a way to thrill him.
“You just immerse yourself in trying to meet and beat the challenges of the systems with your players and trying to get the best deck of cards out on the field and have different kind of patterns of play and so on and so forth. That’s all very, very exciting.
“You’re completely consumed. If I were being truthful, you can never be… playing and even involved in that side of it, you’re consumed, its totality, how to extract the very best from your players, from your team and from yourself in the role that you play, however small it is.”
Is the picture starting to form now? The icon who gravitates towards the good?
Kerry have kicked 5-45 in their last two games. Sure, he is encouraged by what he sees, but he is keen to stress he never lost faith either. There may have been a swell of negativity after two seasons without Sam Maguire. He recognises the quality that is there.
He is used to it too. Before the 1997 final, Fitzgerald had two All-Stars but no All-Ireland. Kerry’s drought stood at 11 years.
Last week Jack O’Connor claimed “your back is to the wall every week in Kerry, that’s the way things operate down there".
Fitzgerald sees beyond it.
"I've been on the terrace now for over 20 years and I love the meeting and chatting. I don't ever get that sense, you get a cohort but sometimes are we inclined as human beings to listen to the loudest, the most negative vibes?
“If you are on the terraces and I am, they love what the players do, they love the sacrifice and the efforts that the players make. I have come down the road and walked out of places like Croke Park after defeats as well and to be honest, most of the company (is saying) they gave it their best.
“We have great supporters, they fully get behind the team and maybe we're a bit selfish because we want our team to be there but that is not a bad thing, that is actually a healthy space to be in if you are a player, you want be at the top.
“You feel it's your dúchas or your DNA to be towards that and that's not a bad thing, that pressure is a good thing.”
He is here as guest speaker for the Munster championship launch. It would be remiss not to ask about the David Clifford factor before he departs to have his photo taken and undertake other duties.
The similarities are obvious. The presence, the movement, his importance to the county.
“He is a phenomenal player with amazing ability and actually knowing him personally because I have been in training, he's a fantastic guy to coach,” he says with a smile.
A great. Can he get even better?
Fitzgerald won Footballer of the Year when he was 28. Clifford, already a two-time winner, is only 26.
“I would think so and I would think he would like to think so. That is the important thing. If you are not reaching, you are going backwards, and I would say David is going to be reaching. Yes is the answer to that.”
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