Paul Murphy is well versed in this notion the only thing harder than holding down a place on the Kerry football team is trying to win it back. Well, aside from players like David Clifford.
Murphy turns 32 next month, one of the most experienced members of the Kerry team. In his debut season, in 2014, he also started his first All-Ireland final and ended up man-of-the-match on a day the Kerry defence restricted a Donegal team — who had just beaten Dublin — to 12 points. He also won an All-Star.
Nine years on, he may no longer be that nailed-down starter, although he regained the number five jersey for the second round-robin game against Cork, which proved Kerry’s best defensive display all season.
You can’t be selfish about it. If someone who isn’t starting is moping around the place, being negative about things, that brings down the energy of the
“That’s the nature of it,” says Murphy, whose league season was interrupted by injury. “If you’re in the starting team, remaining injury free and playing well, chances are you’ll hold on to. It’s very competitive to get a starting jersey.
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“Obviously everyone on that panel would like to be starting, but it doesn’t happen like that. I suppose it was a motivation for me to get back in as it is for probably everyone in the 34, 35 we have in training at the moment.
“You can’t be selfish about it. If someone who isn’t starting is moping around the place, being negative about things, that brings down the energy of the group. You’re less likely to get back in. If I’m a manager looking at somebody who’s got that attitude around the place, I don’t think he’s going to be high up in my thoughts to get a starting jersey back, or be brought on.
“Whatever frustration might be there from a personal point of view you try to channel it into training well. You’ll probably be marking a starting forward in training, so try challenge him well, get him ready for the weekend and by doing that you’re enhancing your own chances as well. If you’re training well, whatever your motivation for training well or training hard, that will probably help you then.”
Murphy had a busy winter away from the Kerry panel. Off winning an All-Ireland Intermediate title with Rathmore, he also got married, and admits now he may have rushed back in a little swiftly: “For the most part it was fine, towards the end of the league all right I felt a bit tired, found it a little bit of a slog, but maybe that’s because we weren’t playing particularly well. We’d four away trips, a lot of mileage covered in the league, which contributes to that as well.”
Looking back at last year’s All-Ireland semi-final win over Dublin, Murphy came off the bench late on, to good effect, the ultimate experience and outcome in that game still fresh enough to carry into Sunday’s final showdown in Croke Park.
“Whatever way you look at that, it was a huge victory for us as a group. Particularly from the 2019 game, you’ve a lot of guys involved still from those finals, so that was a big moment for us as a group, to win a close game in Croke Park. Then go back to last year’s All-Ireland final (against Galway), for spells of the first half there we didn’t perform particularly well, it’s not that we won an All-Ireland with a perfect 70 minutes performance.
The dream scenario is where you’re firing on all cylinders from the first minute to the last
“A lot of it comes down to if you’re working hard enough from a defensive point of view, and I’m not just saying the six backs, but if your forward line are tackling back, if your midfield are tackling back and if you’re slowing down their attacks it’s going to make life difficult for the opposition and if you can click then for a portion of the game from an attacking sense in terms of building attacks together and getting scores over the bar, then you’ve a good chance.
“The dream scenario is where you’re firing on all cylinders from the first minute to the last. It’s unlikely to happen, so you have to be doing enough to the basics to stay in the game and hope that when you get the purple patch that can make it count on the scoreboard.”
As for Clifford’s role on Sunday, Murphy does not disguise the importance of his presence: as a former captain, he also knows about the extra responsibilities on All-Ireland final day.
“He’s an unbelievable player to have in your corner,” says Murphy. “He’s playing at a consistently really high level, delivered for us time and time again. It’s brilliant, gives you a belief that we’re in a good spot here. But we need and we have had others standing up and complimenting it. We can’t be expecting one person to kind of do everything for us, it’s important that the rest of the team step up and keep the scoreboard ticking.”
