Darragh Ó Sé: No one grumbling in Kerry – Dublin deserved it

I was standing in the tunnel at one stage on Sunday as the Kerry players walked past me. Some of them were guys I had played with, won with, lost with. It was hard to watch them, knowing what they were feeling and what they had ahead of them. I felt for them.

Whatever anybody says in the post-mortem, none of them came to the All-Ireland final with that performance in mind.

I felt for Éamonn Fitzmaurice too. My over-riding thought about Fitzy afterwards was, "Who'd be a manager?". One minute you're a genius, the next you're a fool. Did Éamonn Fitzmaurice cost Kerry the All-Ireland? No way. But people always look to the line and the judgment on how they performed never goes much further than what the result said. Kerry lost, so Éamonn, Mikey Sheehy, Cian O'Neill and Diarmuid Murphy are in the firing line.

Here’s the simple truth of it – Dublin were better. More of their players performed to a level somewhere close to their best. You’ll never have 15 players performing in an All-Ireland final but if you can get 10 or 11 going well, you’re in with a shout. Dublin had that. Can Kerry say they had three? Four at a push?

Dublin are the best team in the country and they played accordingly. Kerry didn’t measure up, apart from a few spells in the first 25 minutes. For those periods when Kerry owned the ball, they didn’t make enough use of it. They kicked a string of wides and never got Dublin out of their comfort zone.

Panicked

Dublin never had anything to get panicked about – talk about a dream scenario in an All-Ireland final. You go into an All-Ireland final checking and double-checking that you have all eventualities covered. The whole idea is that you’re training your mind for when the squeeze comes on. You’re getting yourself into the right mindset so that you can react under pressure. But Dublin never had to worry about any of that.

The moment I knew Kerry’s goose was probably cooked was Philly McMahon’s point. He’s been scoring points all year but you wouldn’t worry too much about that on its own. What was really significant was that he sidestepped the Gooch.

First of all, the very fact the Gooch was back there playing as a defender told you Kerry’s gameplan wasn’t working. Colm was probably always going to have to do a bit of tracking back but this was different. This was him having to face up one-on-one to a guy who was full of confidence and fancied himself for a score. That’s no place for one of our greatest ever forwards to be.

Secondly, and more importantly, it told you that McMahon had been allowed to become a big factor in the game. That was a serious mistake from Kerry. Throughout the two Mayo games, McMahon was growing in confidence and influence. We all know the sort of player he is and the sort of persona he has for himself. He plays better when he’s getting under the opposition’s skin, scamping and bullying his way around the place.

This is not new information. There’s nothing in the way Philly McMahon plays that is designed to surprise you. He doesn’t hide it and he doesn’t apologise for it. And good luck to him. He puts it up to you – what are you going to do about it?

Kerry needed someone who was going to bully him back. Somebody who was going to be just as much of a needler of McMahon as he is of others. Fight fire with fire. Kerry didn’t do that. It isn’t Colm’s game and nobody else took it upon themselves. I felt that was a mistake.

It wasn’t the main reason Dublin won but it played its part. So many of their players stood up and were counted. I was down at pitch level for a lot of the game and something that really struck me was how important Cian O’Sullivan was in organising the Dubs’ defence.

I’ll be honest here – I didn’t think he was having much of a season. I felt Dublin weren’t getting his best performances out of him. But what he did on Sunday was sacrifice his game for the greater good and I thought he was very effective. He sat in and gave Rory O’Carroll cover at full back, as well as constantly organising the other defenders around him. To do that on the back of a serious injury was seriously impressive.

A hammering

An All-Ireland final is a day for standing up. I know a lot of people have been giving Stephen Cluxton a hammering because he got rattled with some of his kick-outs but, to me, that's looking at it the wrong way.

Cluxton is like one of those Olympic divers – the guys who get the medals are the ones who attempt the dives with the highest degree of difficulty. The easiest thing in the world for him to have done on Sunday would have been to lamp every ball straight down the middle and let it be someone else’s problem. But he kept trying to get his team the advantage. That’s standing up.

On top of that, he came up and kicked a free in the first half from 48 metres on an angle. This was just around the period when Kerry had a lot of possession but were struggling to make it count. Cluxton came up to take it, and even though he had turned over the ball with four of his first five kick-outs and even though he hadn’t been kicking the frees all year, he stroked it over as if it was a Leinster quarter-final match in June.

That’s one thing you have to say about this Dublin team. They’re ballsy out. They have to learn on the job when it comes to All-Ireland semi-finals and finals because the Leinster championship offers them no adversity to overcome. They were dead and buried against Mayo but they found their way back.

They don't let mistakes affect them. Bernard Brogan was having a bad day at the office in the conditions but when a greasy ball skidded his way after about half an hour, he turned and shot in one movement without even looking at the posts.

Shane Enright was one of the better Kerry players on the day but Brogan gave him no chink of light there, even in adversity. Bernard shook himself out of a poor performance when it was needed most. You have to admire that.

Getting ratty

The worst thing from Kerry’s point of view is that they actually did have some success in targeting Dublin’s strengths but just never answered with any of their own. They disrupted Cluxton’s kick-outs to the point where he starting flapping and getting ratty with his own players and kicking balls out of over the sideline. That was Job One.

Job Two was not to concede a goal, which they achieved. They didn’t even give up that many chances – at least compared to the amount of chances Dublin normally have in a game.

Job Three was to keep them to a manageable total of points, which you’d have to say they did. Nobody would have worried beforehand had they been told Dublin would only score 12 points.

So they did all of that, reducing Dublin’s effectiveness as much as any team have done during Jim Gavin’s time. And still they didn’t come close to winning. It was three points in the end but nobody in Kerry is under any illusions that it was close. The post-mortems are rumbling away down here but nobody’s claiming that we were hard done by. We just didn’t turn up.

Ah look, it’s all a matter of talk for the winter now. Summer’s over, the harvest was bad, the hay was wet and the spuds will be poor. You can do nothing more about it other than to knuckle down and come back. Kerry will beat Dublin in the championship again some day. They have to.

Until then, congratulations to Dublin on a well-deserved All-Ireland.