Nobody can say for sure if their ghost season of low-risk, defanged matches will leave them short for Croke Park assignmentJack O'Connor: his Kerry side have cruised comfortably to Croke Park at the end of June without hardly leaving a trace. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho
The off-the-peg assertion was that Derry had “laid down a marker,” but off-the-peg assertions are a genetically modified alternative to critical thinking and the league is partial to that diet. Derry’s “marker” dissolved like chalk. Their season went all Hollywood and then it went all EastEnders.Galway knock Dublin out of the All-Ireland in second half thriller
“The Kerry lads will be saying in the media, ‘We’ve been tuned in, we’ve been focused,’ but they’re going into games knowing you’re going to win them in second gear,” says Darren O’Sullivan, the former Kerry player and Newstalk analyst. They have deepened their roster of scorers and consciously spread the load. Tom O’Sullivan, their marauding corner back, has been a regular scorer for years, but this year his 10 points from play is equal to Seanie O’Shea. From numbers two to nine they have generated more threat.
A couple of debilitating trends have hung around in Kerry’s system, though, like a low blood count. There was a spike in David Clifford’s output against Meath when he clocked up 2-1 from play, but his overall numbers have been down. Not alarmingly. Last year, he accounted for more than a fifth of Kerry’s total from play in the championship; this year it’s about a sixth. When his scores from play and dead balls are collated his percentage of Kerry’s total is steady away at about 75%.
O’Shea has spent more time in the full-forward line this year, though not exclusively. With Clifford and Paul Geaney in that neighbourhood too, Kerry might have been expected to play the ball inside earlier. That hasn’t been the case so far; it might be a romantic notion. At the other end, Kerry are consistently faced by a blanket defence. Clifford is often double-teamed. The scoring zone is a gridlocked space. As a counter-offensive they needed to develop a variety of threats and other layers of subtlety.