Football finalists will be at height of powers

On GAA: There goes August. Phew! The last month has provided yet another lesson in the futility of trying to micro-manage championship seasons without the gift of hindsight.

At the start of the season little over three months ago, there was an unshakeable view that hurling would continue along its least competitive trajectory in over a decade whereas football, even if fairly predictable, was open to surprises along the way.

And what did we get?

A hurling championship that has burst into life with two exceptionally good semi-finals and a final pairing unseen for 15 years (quite a gap given the game's limited cast).

And a football championship that has provided virtually none of the unheralded qualifier victories that so lit up recent seasons. The provincial series yielded the most traditional of champions in Connacht, Leinster and Munster. Galway, Dublin and Kerry were then joined by Armagh, who had won a fifth Ulster title in seven years.

We are now down to the three counties almost unanimously predicted to contest the All-Ireland at the start of the summer.

The scale of the divergence was brought emphatically to everyone's attention at the weekend. Tyrone and Kerry joined Armagh in raising their game considerably and qualifying for the last three, an exclusive group fittingly cordoned off by the quirk of the draw that saw Kerry reach the All-Ireland final while their two big rivals have still to decide their semi-final.

By way of emphasising this forbidding status quo, the weekend saw the comprehensive defeat of the two counties with the best claims on being fourth and fifth in the footballing order of merit. At least Dublin had pushed their match to a replay and fought away as if faintly incredulous at their inability to get to grips with Tyrone.

Cork, having put in such a bright and transformative season, didn't have anything remotely capable of matching Kerry's extra gears. They were unlucky to have effectively lost Derek Kavanagh to an injury but, like Mayo in last year's final, Cork had already enjoyed their best days of the season whereas their opponents were still gathering momentum.

Both of the remaining matches are fascinating. The two Armagh-Tyrone Ulster finals last month had their moments but both ultimately succumbed to the claustrophobia that stalks their meetings as well as flash-fire controversies over refereeing mistakes.

It's difficult to see how the coming confrontation, bereft of the qualifier safety net, is going to be any more relaxed in character but there is the minimalist hope that football rather than extraneous influences will be the deciding factor.

Last week it was interesting to see the prominent airing of Kerry's widely suggested motivations for this year's championship. In an interview with this newspaper last week, outgoing Limerick manager and former Kerry player Liam Kearns addressed this matter.

"They felt last year that they would have to play a Northern team to win an All-Ireland but that didn't happen. For some players this is an eighth semi-final in nine years. That's a proud record and a lot of work. If they get through to the final and beat an Ulster team - and realistically it would be either Armagh or Tyrone - they would feel that they'd nothing left to do."

Whereas this theory is an understandable reaction to two very traumatic defeats in recent years, it is in a way questionable.

Why should the inability of Armagh and Tyrone to get into Kerry's flight path last year reflect on the champions' success? Three years ago Armagh won the All-Ireland with what was to become a familiar display. By digging in they restricted the early damage even if the missed penalty before half-time suggested that the pressure was getting to the Ulster champions.

Kerry's second-half lassitude meant that the match was reachable in the final quarter but they ended up losing by only a point, having missed good chances and limited their options by refusing to countenance the selection of Tadhg Kennelly on the panel.

A year later and Kerry were a beaten docket. Riven by management tensions, they were there for the taking against Limerick in the Munster final and were swamped by Tyrone's desire and, as is sometimes forgotten, a blistering attacking display in the first quarter.

Last year Tyrone and Armagh were for various reasons running on empty. The death of Cormac McAnallen knocked the stuffing out of Tyrone even before they had to cope with the burden of defending their All-Ireland. It was one of Armagh's less acclaimed feats that they took their defence of the All-Ireland all the way to the following year's final and only lost by a point.

By 2004 the overwhelming of Donegal gave a false sense of Armagh's wellbeing and in the quarter-finals Mayo and Fermanagh applied the coups de grace.

There was nothing in either defeat to suggest that either Tyrone or Armagh would have had any joy with Kerry had they met them instead.

It's reminiscent of 1989 when questions were asked of Cork's All-Ireland because they hadn't beaten Meath. The fact that they had comfortably defeated Meath's conquerors, Dublin, was conveniently overlooked.

Down people chuckle at the fact that they never had to play Kerry in the 1970s or '80s and so preserved their 100 per cent championship record against the game's top county. But it hardly cast a shadow on the achievements of Mick O'Dwyer's team.

This year's final won't really be a clash of philosophies like the 1955 meeting between Dublin and Kerry because the champions have adapted the trademark strategies of the Ulster teams in terms of mobility and interchangeable support play.

But we will have a final of great significance. That's not because Kerry need to validate last year's All-Ireland but rather because both the champions and whoever emerges to challenge them next weekend will be two finalists with momentum and form facing each other at the height of their powers.