The greatest trick Kerry football ever pulled was to convince the world that they deal only in the finest lace. No crowd are better at feigning disinterest in the grubby side of football, the blue-collar stuff that those awful northern counties like to peddle. It’s hard to know which they enjoy more – campaigning in poetry or governing in prose.
This was one of their steel wool days. They scoured Tyrone here from start to finish. On a day when David Clifford had a nightmare in front of goal – just five points from 13 shots – they still only took about an hour to bury the idea that this is a wide open championship. If Kerry hit like this and tackle like this and defend like this, everyone else is playing for second.
We are only weeks away from the 20th anniversary of Tyrone’s famous uprooting of Kerry here in an All-Ireland semi-final. This was that in camera negative. All the aggression came from Jack O’Connor’s side. They made sure that if there was bullying to be done, they weren’t going to wait around to see if they’d be the victims of it. Some days, equalising before the other team score isn’t just a matter of goals and points.
The story of this game is the story of turnovers. Kerry robbed Tyrone of possession 24 times, Tyrone turned Kerry over 15 times. Of those 24 turnovers, 21 happened inside the Kerry 45. Sometimes numbers can be dizzying and sometimes they can be a bottle of smoke. But there isn’t a better measure of the physical domination Kerry had when it mattered most than their defence making 21 turnovers. By contrast, Tyrone only made nine in their defence.
As for what that looked like in real life, it was Diarmuid O’Connor crashing into tackles. It was Tadhg Morely mopping up loose balls. It was Paudie Clifford shouldering Frank Burns out over the sideline. Paul Murphy and Tom O’Sullivan nipping in and timing tackles, Adrian Spillane and Gavin White barrelling into 50/50s and coming away with possession.
It was, above all, a refusal on Kerry’s part to take a backward step. In the verbal battles that went on all across the pitch, the Kerry players jousted away happily, smiling through their gumshields all the while. It was as if they came to Croke Park willing Tyrone to be the bogeymen, daring the ghosts of Ryan McMenamin and Conor Gormley to swoop down from the eaves and get involved in the sledging.
But this Tyrone is not that Tyrone. When Kerry put the squeeze on them here, they revealed themselves as a team whose reputation far exceeds their skills. They’ve played nine championship matches since winning the 2021 All-Ireland and won three – against Armagh and Donegal this year and Fermanagh last year. All our notions of what a danger they were going to be to Kerry came to nothing.
We thought the Tyrone midfield was going to dominate O’Connor and Jack Barry in the air. They didn’t. When Conn Kilpatrick tiptoed into full-forward late in the first half, Burns tried to pick him out with a hoisted ball in front of the Hill 16 goal. O’Connor calmly rose above him and tapped the ball down to the waiting Morley and Kerry were away. Tyrone weren’t just outfought, they were outthought too.
Kerry were on a war footing, always. The first half ended with Paudie Clifford chuntering away in the middle of four Tyrone players, ready for any and all trouble that might present itself. He was whipping around the place like a fireman’s hose, threatening to splatter anyone who came into his orbit. David Clifford came over and placed his hand on the back of his brother’s neck, like an owner assuring his pitbull that there was plenty of red meat to come after the break.
But in truth, Kerry had broken Tyrone by this stage. A three-point half-time lead stretched out to seven 10 minutes after the break. Ruairí Canavan had put in a sparkling cameo in the first half, whipping two dummy-solo points inside five minutes. But this had long since stopped being his kind of game and he was hooked on 45 minutes.
It was around that time that his brother Darragh was beaten to a high ball by Tom O’Sullivan down at the Davin End goals. If you wanted to sum up what the game had become that was about it. For one thing, no part of Tyrone’s game plan during the week would have involved planting a high ball in on top of Darragh Canavan. For another, Tom O’Sullivan might go his whole career without winning another aerial battle. Little wonder he came away from the exchange smiling to himself.
There was half an hour to go and both sides knew what was what. Tyrone went home a diminished thing, hammered into the ground like tent pegs. With Kerry in this mood, they won’t be the last team it happens to.
