Paul Geaney: ‘I don’t think the Kerry public understand the power they have, the energy we get off them’
SOME DAY: Páidí Geaney, looks up at his dad Paul Geaney making the victory speech with Corn Pháidí Uí Shé after Kerry's Munster SFC final win over Cork at Fitzgerald Stadium. Pic: Brendan Moran/Sportsfile
THE conversation with Kerry captain Paul Geaney might ordinarily begin with moments from the Dingle All-Ireland miracle, or the familial connections last Sunday week as a non-playing skipper handed the new Munster SFC trophy by son Páidí in honour of the lad’s grandfather.
Instead, he is musing over the numerical scale of Cork’s red hordes in Fitzgerald Stadium and doing the math. Eight thousand? Oh, significantly more. Double that? Was there 15,000 Cork supporters tinting Fitzgerald Stadium red? Not far short of it.
The point?
“Just on the crowd for the Donegal game, Saturday. There’s top brass coming to town.”
And the need for footfall and noise. Local noise. A rallying call.
It’s tricky and vague putting currency on crowd noise, scoring support from the terracing in real terms. In percentage points.
“Us players calling on the Kerry fans, we don’t really care how it looks,” Geaney shrugs. “It’s plain to see that it affects and helps us. It’s real. These are labelled one percenters, but they are really 5-6 percenters. David (Clifford) did it last year after the Cavan game in Killarney. Things weren’t rolling too well. He felt it, we all did.”
Arsenal’s manager Mikel Arteta has poked and whipped up a resurgence of the north London hordes this season. Arrive early, bring your porridge, create a din, he implored. It’s energised the house. Now thousands greet the team bus at Ashburton in a Latin American gush of fanaticism.
It’s some way shy of that outside our GAA stadia, but Geaney wants Kerry green and gold to fill those Cork spots Saturday at Fitzgerald Stadium and bring noise. They have Páidí’s cup but Donegal are a tougher needle to thread.
“We don’t know what this summer holds, how long or how short it is (for Kerry), but it’s safe to assume there won’t be a bigger championship game in Killarney in 2026. And whatever we do for the rest of the summer, we won’t do it without the backing of the Kerry support.”
If this isn’t backs flush to the wall, fight-til-we-drop clarion call, it’s not hard to draw a line from Geaney’s comments to the Kingdom’s depleted playing resource. There is talk of two lads back on the 26 but several are looking to Round 2 for a return. The expectation is that, with good weather and no free-to-air tv coverage, the attendance will push north of 25,000 come Saturday at 3pm.
“We have the defending All-Ireland champions against the team they beat last year who are now current Division 1 League champions. Last Sunday week was fantastic but it’s championship from now on, it’s consequential in All-Ireland terms.
"As a father, I’d look at it as an opportunity to bring the kids down to the stadium. When I was growing up, we were starved of this sort of occasion. Because we have been the only Munster team in Division 1 for a while, and with a provincial final only every other year, Kerry fans are asked to travel outside the county and the province an awful lot. These championship days in Killarney are pretty rare.”
When Clifford was doing his pied piper exhortations after scoring 3-7 against Cavan last summer, every ear was cocked. Jack O’Connor was upstairs putting meat on the bones of Kerry’s struggle for form and confidence. A loss to Meath followed by a scratchy win over Cavan.
“There was a lot of pressure on the Kerry players today from the supporters after last week,” O’Connor said last June. “That was a difficult environment for the lads, there was huge pressure to perform and that can be a very difficult environment. I just felt there were times when the pressure got to the lads a bit and they didn’t express themselves the way they could.”
Geaney well recalls the edgy temperature around the place. “I had done an interview the week before, after losing to Meath, at the Championship launch. I mentioned the need for support to Marty (Morrissey), things weren’t clicking at that point. We’d had quite a good league, then we had five or six guys missing against Meath. Things were tetchy enough the following week, we had gone from stormin’ to normal.
"Maybe Kerry looked past the Cavan one a small bit. I get it, I know from being in the tourism business, summer can be tricky that way in Kerry, folk don’t have the time, it’s expensive, there’s communions and confirmations. But I don’t think the Kerry public understand the power they have, the energy we get off them, in terms of a connection.
“When David called for arms that time, there was a kind of a lull moment there in our season. It could have went either way. But the Kerry public knew our backs were to the wall. Kerry people don’t like being written off, and we were. That was a trigger. When Dave asked, people answered."
Captain Geaney has the megaphone now. “It wasn’t a case of ‘poor us, we don’t get support’ because we do, the length and breadth of the country in the League. It was more a rallying cry, we need to throw everything at this.
“It was fitting with the (Munster SFC) cup named after Paidi, that it was a real Munster final occasion that he used to relish, and his whole thing about Kerry finding their groove when the cuckoo is heard. Was that a hand me down from Micko to Paidi? It might have been, but it’s kind of bred now into Kerry people.
“As an athlete you look for percentages everywhere, and if you are told that with an extra bit of training, you can get one per cent, you will do it. The Kerry crowd are worth more than a percentage point. Exhibit A and B were our two Armagh games in Croke Park in 2024 and 2025, they were chalk and cheese. Last year, Jack mentioned how the Armagh crowd had risen all around us in ’24. Last year, the Kerry players would have felt the pulses from the stands, it felt like it went nuts every time we scored.”
Geaney was outside the white lines for the All-Ireland final last year against Donegal. The afternoon the telepathy between the support and their folk heroes surged.
“It changed. Having been involved in 2014 and winning against the head that year, that was special for breaking a barren spell, but it couldn’t live up to last summer in the manner the All-Ireland was won. You would have to be envious not being part of that attacking machine last July, those are the days you dream of, when a team is in full flow state.
"A score in the final – possession went down the Cusack Stand side, Dylan (Geaney) cut in, it was tapped down by Sean O’Brien to Sean O’Shea who moved it onto Paudie Clifford for the score in the Hill 16 end. That was street football. It spoke for itself but it spoke for us all, you know what I mean? For a full team and the lads coming on to be in the zone for 60-70 minutes is incredible and it still kindles a lot of football chat down here.
“You are in a bus getting a Garda escort, the hairs are standing up on the back of your neck. We had it three times last year going into Croke Park, the effect it has, the adrenaline rushing you off the bus, into the dressing room, you start better in a game because of it. It is tangible.”
Kerry are some way shy of that flow state at the minute, by it’s still May. They’ll take all the beating. With McGuinness and the lads in town, they’re braced. Geaney knows Kerry won’t pull up the drawbridge. They can’t and it’s not their way. Killarney will be warm and sticky. Hotter again by 3pm. And loud to boot.
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