Cooper gets the job done for Kingdom

GAELIC GAMES:JOB FACED for Kerry, job done for Kerry. An All-Ireland final spot tucked away before the first bar is sung about how the pale moon was rising above the green mountains. They came to Croke Park yesterday looking to blow a Kieran Donaghy-shaped hole in the wall of Mayo's defence but in the end it was Colm Cooper who had the 50,643 crowd gawping like freshly-caught fish.

His 1-7 eased Kerry clear for a 1-20 to 1-11 victory to put them into their eighth final in 10 years.

We can forget about Colm Cooper sometimes. Not forget about him, as in, “Who’s yer man with the freckles?” More just as in we can forget what we’re living through. He’s an era all by himself, the only player of his generation to come close to that kind of billing. Declan O’Sullivan might be one of the best forwards ever to wear a Kerry jersey but would you call these the Declan O’Sullivan years? Nope.

Yet for the first half here yesterday, Jack O’Connor’s side all but excluded Cooper from the game. Donaghy spent a good 75 per cent of the warm-up in the square in front of the Hill 16 goals fielding high balls pumped into him, getting into his groove for the day. And once the game started Kerry had one plan and one plan only – air-mailing ball after ball in on top of their full-forward. Even as Mayo full-back Ger Cafferkey dealt more than ably with it, they persisted, much to the annoyance of an increasingly tetchy Cooper.

Ho hum. Even the citizens of Giza must go about their day most of the time without giving the Pyramids a second glance. This game was won in 20 minutes after half-time and it was the Gooch who did the winning of it. When Andy Moran kicked his second point on 43 minutes, it took the scoreline to 0-10 to 0-8 in Kerry’s favour. Game on? Not a hope. It was just Cooper’s cue to stretch his legs, scoring two of the next three points and putting the other on a plate for Paul Galvin. And when Cillian O’Connor briefly raised Mayo’s noses above the waterline with a cracking goal in the 53rd minute, it was Cooper who pushed them under for good with a stunner of his own in the 54th. Game over.

“This is his theatre here,” said O’Connor of his captain. “This is his happy hunting ground and no better place to come into form. Hopefully he can maintain that now over the next month. We felt we weren’t playing to his strengths, getting him on the ball enough.

“A big part of it today was about getting him on the ball, because he’s a genius with the ball. It was wasted sometimes and maybe we weren’t actively looking for him enough in the games up to now. But we were never overly worried about Gooch because we know what he can do.”

Mayo squeezed and squalled all the way through, sometimes throwing their weight around with a little too much recklessness. If they deserved credit for the game they gave Kerry here, they deserve a little spotlight too for some of the cheaper shots they tossed about the place. The further the result got from them, the narkier they became, with Galvin invariably picked out for special treatment when he came on.

James Horan has a raw side on his hands but you get the feeling he’ll make men of them in time. This was about as encouraging a first draft of the story he’d like to tell as he could have hoped for at the start of the year.

Dropping Kevin McLaughlin back as a seventh defender worked well and got them in just two points down at half-time. But it wasn’t going to win them the game, merely limit the leakage.

“We had goal chances at the end to make it a bit closer but at that stage Kerry were on top and they ran out deserved winners,” said Horan. “What it boiled down to for me was that we made too many mistakes. We carried the ball into tackles too often and took shots under too much pressure and kicked away some soft kick passes, which Kerry got. We made too many mistakes to win an All-Ireland semi-final.”

So Kerry roll on. And Cooper rolls on. To his eighth All-Ireland final and him just gone 28. This is his time. Lucky are we to be living in it.