In the winter of 2009, the Dublin management knew they had some sorting out to do. Their first season had pulled the old switcheroo on them, revealing its true nature far too late for them to do anything about it. They went into the All-Ireland quarter-final against Kerry full sure they were contenders. It took Colm Cooper all of 37 seconds to ransack their certainties.
It was the day of the startled earwigs, Pat Gilroy’s magnificent phrase describing his players in the opening 15 minutes. But watching it back now, what jumps out from the screen is just how slow and passive the Dublin players were in response to the goal. Kerry were Kerry to the max — quick movement, urgent kick-passing, the scoreboard spinning like Porsche’s odometer.
By contrast, Dublin looked spooked. It was the first goal they had conceded all summer but instead of jolting them into action, they were paralysed. Kerry blitzed them around midfield and they didn’t post a score until Barry Cahill got up for a point in the ninth minute. A bank holiday Monday, Croke Park sizzling, everything on the line. But they were stuck to the ground. Why?
And so, as the leaves turned and the nights darkened, Gilroy and Mickey Whelan conducted a slew of one-on-ones with the Dublin panel. After he had lost count of — and patience with — the number of players who put the Kerry collapse down to the shock of that Cooper goal, Whelan stopped up and asked a typically blunt question. “When is the best time to concede a goal? Is it the first minute or the 70th?”
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The goal wasn’t the thing. The reaction was. And baked into that reaction was so much more than just the concession of three points. In August 2009, Dublin hadn’t beaten Kerry in championship for 32 years. Their record since the 1977 All-Ireland semi-final was eight games, seven defeats, one draw.
It didn’t matter that Dublin were favourites. It didn’t matter that Kerry were having a summer from hell. When Cooper’s goal went in, Dublin didn’t need much convincing that the game was beyond them.
“Our confidence went,” says Cahill now. “We went into our shell. We just collapsed. We had lost to them in ‘04 when they were a good bit better than us and we had pushed them close in ‘07. But going into that ‘09 game, we were confident. Probably over-confident — the Leinster Championship had been good and we thought they were there for the taking. But when push came to shove, there was an issue there.
“It wasn’t always going to be the best 15 who started. It was going to be the most cohesive 15 and we’d work from there”
— Former Dublin player Barry Cahill
“That led to a winter of self-reflection. I remember going out to meet Pat and Mickey in DCU and that Kerry game was a big part of it obviously. Two things came out of it. One, we were going to target the league and take it much more seriously, especially going down to play Kerry in Killarney. And two, it wasn’t always going to be the best 15 who started. It was going to be the most cohesive 15 and we’d work from there.”
Look what happened. Kerry went on to gather in another All-Ireland that autumn but nobody could have guessed what was blowing in the wind. David Moran was on the bench that day for Kerry but didn’t get a run and so 13 years later, we are left with a neat summary of it all. No current Kerry player has a championship win over Dublin to his name. Just as no current Dublin player has suffered a championship defeat to Kerry.
If consolation is to be found for the current Kerry squad, it’s that they have a bit to go yet to reach the county’s longest period without a win in the fixture. In the early 20th century, Kerry went 19 years — from 1906 to 1925 — not beating Dublin, albeit the meetings were decidedly fewer and further between in those days. The two sides faced off only twice in that period, in 1909 and 1924.
Even so, Kerry’s general dominance of the fixture across the decades was such that those two wins stood as Dublin’s only back-to-back victories until the 1970s. Otherwise, with the occasional exception of a draw here and there, Kerry usually always won. They were unbeaten between 1941 and 1975 and again between 1978 and 2009. Little wonder the Dubs were in their own heads when the needle went into read.
All different now, of course. The record since that 2009 game is Dublin 5 Kerry 0, with one draw. Three of those games were All-Ireland finals — you have to go back to Down in the 1960s to find the last time Kerry lost three finals to any county in such quick succession without landing a blow themselves.
This stuff teeters on tiny things. Kevin McManamon’s goal in the 2011 final flipped so much about this fixture on its head. The 2009 winter didn’t just see a change of attitude in the Dublin panel — the overhaul in personnel was a big thing too. McManamon, Michael Darragh Macauley, Mick Fitzsimons, Rory O’Carroll and Eoghan O’Gara all landed in across that off season. “We honestly didn’t know who half of them were,” says Cahill.
So Dublin were coming, that much was clear. They won that league game in Killarney in February 2010 — incredibly, it was the first victory by a Dublin team in Kerry since 1982. They followed it up with another win in Croke Park the following spring — their first back-to-back league wins over Kerry since the late ‘90s. All of which meant that whatever happened in the 2011 final, they weren’t going to fizzle away like they had two years previously.
To this day, it’s the game most Kerry people would have back if they could. Even this week on the Football Pod with Paddy Andrews, James O’Donoghue was still sighing with bitter regret at Kerry’s failure to see that game out. “Ah, ‘11 was cat,” he said. “That game was done, like. It was almost game over but then Declan (O’Sullivan) got concussed and he ended up back in the full-back line and McManamon got a great goal.”
Did it change everything? That’s probably a stretch. But it changed enough. It meant an All-Ireland, first and foremost. It meant a final victory over Kerry, which had only happened once in the previous 88 years. Most of all, it meant that when Jim Gavin brought through the next generation a couple of years later, overcoming decades of rot and misery at Kerry’s hands wasn’t on the to-do list.
And for the players who did it, it meant they woke up to a different world. In the late spring of 2012, Gilroy brought the Dubs on a training camp down to Dingle. They made a long weekend out of it, training away on the beaches, playing matches among the panel, finding themselves for the road ahead. They put down one of the nights in Páidí Ó Sé's pub, a scatter of pints for everyone and endless slagging with the locals.
Would they have had the gumption for it if they weren’t All-Ireland champions? Maybe. It would have appealed to Gilroy’s twin senses of mischief and bloody-mindedness, that’s for sure. But the players would have had to swallow hard at the thought of it. Winning changed everything.
“I remember one of the nights, Alan Brogan and I went down the town for an ice-cream after training,” says Cahill. “And it was a case of, we feel comfortable enough in our own skin to do this. That came from winning the All-Ireland and beating them to do it. If we hadn’t done it, I’m not sure we’d have been going near Kerry in the first place.
“We definitely would have thought twice about strolling down the town for ice-cream. We would have been too self-conscious. We would have felt that people would be looking at us and pointing and going, ‘there’s the Dublin footballers, they still haven’t beaten Kerry ...’ There’s a psychology shift there. I’m comfortable going down to Kerry now!”
Question is, when will the next shift come? The clearest warning sign that a tsunami is on the way is the tide receding further out than usual. Kerry haven’t won in six attempts, an unprecedented lapse in the history of these two counties.
When the wave comes crashing back in, we shouldn’t be surprised if it clears all before it.
