Kerry and Dublin resurgent as sons of Ulster march towards the exit

Observe the sons of Ulster. The Northern province sent down to Croke Park three teams at the weekend. Two were charged with staving off the inevitable Dublin-Kerry All-Ireland football final and one with bringing back the Tailteann Cup.

In the end, none was successful. Monaghan and Derry strove mightily on Saturday and Sunday to challenge the favourites in their respective semi-finals whereas Down were curiously flat and ended up undermining their own favouritism, leaving Meath as the second Tier 2 champions.

Tailteann’s coming home.

Monaghan never led Dublin at any stage on Saturday but nor did they trail by much and, in the end, they went the way of so many of the winners’ opponents, slightly defamed by the scoreline. A late scoring dam-burst left them trailing by seven points in a packed Croke Park.

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Sunday was the real day of heartbreak for Ulster, as their standard bearers Derry rolled in to take on defending All-Ireland champions Kerry. They did all the things expected of them, defended tightly, counter-attacked at pace and created chances.

What hadn’t been anticipated was that they would do so with such conviction that they would lead all the way to half-time with just two brief exceptions: when footballing laureate David Clifford got his opening score in the third minute and when the same player sent over a free in the 23rd.

They had swept forward for a goal in the fifth minute, scored by the expertly raiding Gareth McKinless. If it was a call to arms, what followed next must have had a deflationary effect. Within 60 seconds, they had been opened up themselves, Seán O’Shea teeing up Gavin White for a tap-in.

Score a goal against Kerry and concede one immediately. It was a vignette to sum up Derry misgivings but they played as if they hadn’t noticed.

[ Kerry v Derry: Five key moments from the All-Ireland football semi-final ]

At the break it was 1-11 to 1-8 and the trend was that Derry were the better side, as a slightly downbeat Jack O’Connor gave his reaction.

“I mean you’d have to take your hats off to Derry. They played some football out there and I just said to the boys at half-time that, you know, Derry had played most of the football in the first half.

“There was still only a score in it and it was important that we hit the ground running at the start of the second half. I think that got us back in the game with a chance but, you know, Derry kept coming.

“They didn’t lie down. They were a serious team today and, on another day, they could easily have won that game.”

They could easily have won it on Sunday as well. Shane McGuigan’s free in the 59th minute put them ahead, 1-14 to 1-12. It should have been more.

A few minutes earlier, McKinless was nearly in for a second goal but Shane Ryan – who earlier had come out of goal to kick a point, yet another cultural appropriation from Ulster, as Derry’s Odhran Lynch was already on the scoreboard – was alert and saved.

The Kerry ‘keeper previously did a passable Harald Schumacher impersonation when leaping into McGuigan in centrefield and leaving his opponent dazed before scoring his point. Referee Joe McQuillan was as unmoved as his 1982 soccer antecedent, Charles Corver.

As on Saturday, the favourites asserted themselves in the closing minutes. Dublin outscored Monaghan by 1-5 to 0-1 in the last 15 minutes. A day later, Kerry took the 1-12 to 1-14 deficit and scored the next five points, only conceding the last score when McGuigan overcooked a presumed attempt to engineer a life-saving goal.

O’Connor paid tribute to his team.

“Any questions that were asked of our fellas, you know, had we the bottle for it? Had we the heart for it? That’s what that game turned into in the end.

“There were mistakes galore. I mean out there in the middle of the field near the end, David won a great turnover, then we gave it straight back to the boys, then we won it back again, that kind of thing.

“So, there were huge mistakes but by God was there some honesty in that and some honesty by the players, honesty of effort was incredible.”

His opposite number, Ciarán Meenagh, was bluntly asked had they thrown it away. He bluntly agreed.

“We did. We came here to win this game. There has been a lot of punditry and a lot of commentary about our style of play and a lot of that is fair but that also created a lot of opportunity for us because Kerry might have looked at it like that as well.

“We probably are in a state of shock because we expected to win the game. Not for once did we envisage anything other than planning for an All-Ireland final. We were really confident coming into the game.”

The dust settled on two All-Ireland semi-finals. All the songs are sung: Dublin play Kerry in a fortnight.

The oldest and most familiar refrain of all.