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Ciarán Murphy: The All-Ireland final is a brutal, cut-throat business

‘Try to imagine last Sunday’s game through the eyes of four marquee forwards on display’

Kerry's Jack Barry competes in the air with Damien Comer of Galway in what was a memorable All-Ireland final. Photograph: Bryan Keane/Inpho

Ciarán Murphy's face
Ciarán Murphy
Thu Jul 28 2022 - 06:00

The Premier League starts next week: 20 teams, 380 games, each team plays each other team home and away. At the end of the season, we will know the champions, the relegated teams will disappear to the Championship and the playing records of about 400 players will be pored over and a general consensus reached.

Here are the best players in the league, the players who are capable of playing in the league and the players who just don’t have what it takes to have a lengthy career at the top level.

For all the money, for all the rewards, it’s an extraordinarily brutal ecosystem. It is brutal, but it is fair, 38 games over 10 months seems a fairly decent number, and a fairly decent timespan, to come to a decision about a fella’s ability to be there in the first place.

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Gaelic games do not allow for that. Each game you win is immediately dwarfed by the game that follows. If you play well in a provincial semi-final, but then don’t perform in the provincial final, it’s nearly worse than if you hadn’t played well in the semi-final in the first place.

Then you go into the All-Ireland series and the questions start again. Can you do it in Croke Park? Doing it in your province is one thing, when you’re playing against the same shower you play every year. What about when the pressure is really on?

And when the pressure is really on, and you deliver under that most intense pressure in an All-Ireland semi-final, by 10 miles the most important game of football you’ve ever played in … you wake up the following morning and realise that the questions are only starting.

By sheer force of personality, they managed to insert themselves into the play in the last 10 minutes

The All-Ireland final is a brutal, cut-throat business. Just try to imagine last Sunday’s game through the eyes of the four marquee forwards on display. David Clifford and Seán O’Shea for Kerry and Damien Comer and Shane Walsh for Galway.

What two of this quartet did on Sunday is already a part of history. Their names will be joined forever — the Clifford-Walsh final of 2022.

Kerry's Seán O'Shea and John Daly of Galway in Sunday's memorable All-Ireland final. Photograph: Inpho

Comer hit 2-2 in Galway’s semi-final win over Derry. He was a force of nature, irrepressible. Seán O’Shea started their semi-final win over Dublin in a whirlwind and hit “the kick from the end of the earth” as Michael Foley called it on the Sunday Game that night, for what might turn out to be the most impactful moment of this football decade.

Both of them had zero shots on goal from play in the All-Ireland final. The men tasked with marking them, Liam Silke and Jason Foley, had more shots on goal from play than they had (one apiece).

By sheer force of personality, they managed to insert themselves into the play in the last 10 minutes: Comer with his magnificent mark to set up Galway’s equaliser with seven minutes of ordinary time left, O’Shea with a couple of late assists in Kerry’s final surge.

But it wasn’t the performance either of them had dreamed of. O’Shea ended the day lifting Sam Maguire, Comer knows he tried his heart out and created plenty of space for Walsh to work his magic. One will be of rather more consolation than the other.

This is the brutal truth of All-Ireland final day. Think of the players who in the past have had quiet All-Ireland final performances thrown back in their faces as “unimpeachable” proof that they just don’t quite have it — incredibly, DJ Carey and Colm Cooper spent parts of their career in that bracket.

With Cooper it wasn’t so much All-Ireland final day, but All-Ireland final days when Kerry were under pressure … as if his effervescent displays in easy All-Ireland final wins weren’t directly responsible for that lack of pressure.

There was a time in the last decade when it appeared as if he was barely compatible with the game’s direction of travel

That argument, in its way, speaks to a reality for Kerry footballers and Kilkenny hurlers. If one big day passes you by, then there will probably be a chance to redeem yourself before too long. It’s not 38 games, but at least it’s a body of work.

And that is why so many people were so happy for Shane Walsh. There was a time in the last decade when it appeared as if he was barely compatible with the game’s direction of travel, which would have been a truly damning indictment. If there wasn’t room for a talent as luminous as Walsh in the sport, was it even a sport worth fighting for?

People with preconceived notions of Walsh’s consistency and work rate saw what they wanted to see in his performances against Armagh and Derry, but last Sunday brooked no argument. It was a display for the ages. The hope must be that this Galway team are good enough to get back there and give him another chance to perform on the biggest stage again.

A final word on the lunacy of our fixation on All-Ireland final day. If David Clifford had been held relatively quiet from play (as poor Cork sides have done two years in a row, lest we forget) don’t think for a moment he would have been immune from criticism.

That is the mootest of moot points now of course. For better or worse, All-Ireland final day heroics end the discussion.

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