Chasing David Clifford: The magical mystery tour of Fossa’s run to the All-Ireland final

Aoife Dowd was back home in west Kerry in mid-August. That’s what you do, right?

Dowd has been living and working in Dublin since the mid-2000s – “I’m what you’d call an economic migrant,” she laughs – but a lot of people from a lot of places spend plenty of money to be in Kerry in August. Only the wilful wouldn’t go when they have it for free.

Her home place is Brandon, on the northern tip of the Dingle Peninsula. Her club is Castlegregory, out across the bay. That Saturday was warm and gorgeous and the caravan parks in Maharees were humming. Once word got around, a cast of hundreds decided there was no better way to cap a day than to head over and watch David Clifford do his thing. He’d be doing it for Fossa but no matter. You don’t get to choose what stardust hits as it falls.

“My father was saying to me, ‘Will we go?’” Dowd remembers. “I said, ‘Of course we’ll go! Sure isn’t everyone going?’ We got there and you could see kids in jerseys from all over the country. Laois jerseys, Limerick jerseys, Dublin jerseys. They were all down on holidays and here they were, to see David Clifford.

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“There was a massive crowd. I would say it was the biggest crowd that was ever in the place since the opening of the new field in 1997. The field before in Castlegregory used have a bit of a slope in it but they redid it altogether and they opened it with a match between Kerry and Mayo in ‘97. That was the biggest attendance we ever had, up until this game against Fossa.”

Castlegregory hung in there for much of the way and one of Dowd’s neighbours held the boy prince to just two points from play. Sadly for his team, Clifford added another 1-7 from placed balls and Fossa were comfortably clear by the end.

At the final whistle, it was like the gates clanking open at Glastonbury. Streams of kids ran onto the pitch, all shotgunning towards the low goals where Clifford was shaking hands with his marker. They came at such as speed that when the first one reached him, he bumped the Footballer of the Year into taking a backward step. First time for everything.

Dowd caught it all on camera and thereby invented the most wholesome sub-genre of content in Irish sport. The venue has kept changing as Fossa’s run to the All-Ireland has progressed – Tralee, Castlegregory, Fossa, Annascaul, Killarney, Castlemahon, Mallow, Portlaoise.

The weather has turned colder and wetter, the background murkier and darker. But the scene is the same now as it was then – the ref blows the long whistle, every child in the ground scuds towards the Fossa number 14. Bedlam.

“There’s a bit of Beatlemania to it,” says Eamonn Fitzmaurice, the former Kerry manager who is in Fossa’s backroom team this year.

“He came back into the dressing room last week in Portlaoise and it was the first time that he was a bit worried for some of the younger kids, that they’d maybe fall or get hurt doing it. But otherwise, it doesn’t faze him at all. He’s very normal, very humble.

“The crowds coming out has added to the enjoyment of it all. There’s been a different energy to the games. You would always have got a bit of a crowd to junior championship matches in Kerry – I remember that from my time playing with Finuge. But nothing like this.

“We played an All-Ireland junior final in Portlaoise in 2005 and there were four clubs there that day because it was a double-header with the intermediate final. But even then, there was nothing like the crowd that came last Sunday.

“People came from all over the midlands to see it. I talked to people from Cavan, there were people there from Wicklow, Westmeath. Plenty of Laois people just came along for the day as well.”

Something has happened here. Something unique and pure and very probably unrepeatable. The game’s best player has been turning out week after week as a junior footballer. Drawing unprecedented crowds to what are, after all, matches from the lowest rung on the football ladder. First within Kerry, as the summer lazed and lolled. Later in Munster and beyond as the winter weather came sheeting down.

They have come from all over to see him. Marc Ó Sé has been managing Listry for the past couple of seasons, Fossa’s next-door neighbours and sworn rivals. He ran into Tomás Ó Flatharta a while back and raised an eyebrow when Ó Flatharta said he’d been down to one of their games in the championship. It took him a moment to realise that what his uncle Páidí's old compadre was really saying was that he’d been to see Fossa and the Clifford brothers play Ó Sé's side.

As it happened, Listry handed Fossa their one defeat of the whole championship, overcoming them by a point in the final group game. Both sides were already through to the knock-out stages by then but when clubs separated by two miles of road meet in championship, it’s no dead rubber. David Clifford missed a free at the death to draw the game and the Listry crowd harooed long and loud. And then every kid in the place sprinted out to him, missed free or no missed free.

Fossa caught them in the long grass, eventually. Come November, Listry handled the Clifford brothers pretty well for most of the Kerry junior final, sticking their best man-marker on Paudie to cut off the supply to David and finding their way to the closing stages with a four-point lead. But a scrappy late goal sent it to extra-time and David went on the rampage, whipping over score after score and ending the day with a tally of 2-12.

“I had a word with our full-back before the game,” Ó Sé says. “And I said, ‘Look, all you can do is your best on him. The one thing I’ll say is don’t poke the bear. Go out and play him but don’t get it into your head that you’re going to put him off his game. It’s a waste of energy.’

“And in fairness, he did what we told him. He just played him straight up, no mouthing, no pulling and dragging, just did his best on him and did okay. But he picked up a yellow card so at half-time we said we’ll make a switch here. We moved our full-back off him and put his brother in there.

“It was only when the game started up again that I realised I hadn’t warned the brother about not poking the bear. And sure enough, I looked up and he was digging away at him and giving him plenty in his ear. Sure Clifford went to town on us then. I was going, ‘Can someone please go in there and tell him to shut the f*ck up?!’”

By the end, Fossa were 4-15 to 0-22 to the good and the Clifford caravan was picking up speed. As losing manager, Ó Se knew he had the customary visit to the opposition dressing room to make.

“But then I looked out onto the pitch and the swarm of kids that surrounded him. He’s so giving of his time. He’d just won a county title with his friends and he was there signing everything and standing for selfies till the cows came home. I knew there’d be no way he’d be into the dressing room for another half an hour and I wasn’t going to go in and give a speech without him there. So I went off and had my shower first.”

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Onwards. Kerry clubs have won 18 of the 21 Munster junior titles since the competition started in 2001. Putting it mildly, these are not fixtures that have tended to draw much of an audience. And certainly never a neutral one. Until now.

Feohanagh-Castlemahon are based in west Limerick, deep in hurling country. It’s the club of Tommy Quaid and Joe Quaid and home to one of the modern-day Limerick superstars in Seamie Flanagan. They play in Coolyroe, smuggled away off a byroad a few miles south of Newcastlewest. The idea that they would ever sell out a football match would have been absurd at every point in the club’s history, right up until it was confirmed that David Clifford was coming up the road.

Munster Council Statement, November 26th 2022 (for immediate release): Today’s Munster club junior football championship semi-final clash between Fossa (Kerry) and Castlemahon (Limerick) at Coolyroe, Quaid Park has sold out. The Limerick venue has reached its 1,500 capacity and supporters without a ticket, including U16s, are now being asked by Munster Council not to travel as there won’t be tickets available at the grounds.

Liam Aherne has been doing commentaries on matches in and around the midwest for years – you know his voice even if you don’t know his face. In early November, he got a call from Raf Rocca, owner of Streamsport Ireland who cover games for the Munster Council, asking for a favour at short notice – any chance he’ll do Castlemahon’s game against Waterford champions Shamrocks for him?

Grand, no hassle. And then they won. And then the news came through that they’d be playing the Cliffords next. Aherne wasted no time calling in the favour and rang Rocca straight away. “Eh, you know they way I dug you out there – can I do the Fossa game the next day?” Shameless. And just right.

“Coolyroe never saw anything like it,” Aherne says. “The stand was full an hour before the game. And everybody knew it was going to be a total mismatch so it wasn’t as if they were coming to see a contest or anything. They were coming to see David Clifford.”

Scenes and snapshots. The Munster club finals were fixed for Mallow just before Christmas. Junior and intermediate in a double-header on the Saturday, senior on the Sunday. Not only did the Saturday crowd dwarf the Sunday one, the junior final held the whip-hand over everything.

In the first half of Fossa v Kilmurry, most of the crowd gathered at the end of the pitch Clifford was playing into. At half-time, whole swathes of them trooped down to the other end and pitched camp for the second half. Towards the end, the PA announcer pleaded with fans to stay off the pitch at the full-time whistle and allow the intermediate teams warm up. He was roundly and magnificently ignored.

All in all, it’s been a magical mystery tour, the perfect confluence of events. The Footballer of the Year, the GAA’s brightest superstar, paddling in backwaters to the delight of whoever turns up. Springsteen playing dancehalls, a tenner on the door.

As long as he stays injury-free, Fossa probably won’t play junior again during his career. True, these kind of scenes will likely be repeated in late summer next year whenever Fossa or East Kerry are playing but they’ll nearly be performative by then. It won’t be like this.

“There’s a social media element to it all,” Fitzmaurice points out. “I think that magnifies it to some extent. Younger supporters are all into seeing clips and being part of it and it feeds itself after a while. In fairness to David, it could get claustrophobic if he was a different sort of person. But he handles it all so well.”

Maybe that changes as time passes. Clifford is 24 in a fortnight and the first phase of his career is behind him. History tells us that the biggest stars in sport shrink into themselves that bit more with each passing year. They share less of themselves, they curdle ever so slightly, they suspect – often correctly – that everyone wants something from them. If none of that happens to David Clifford, he’s even more exceptional than we think.

For now, this was a spontaneous thing, a rolling snowball of organic, innocent good. A splash of wonder in a world increasingly parched of it.