David Clifford interview: ‘Our mom would have absolutely hated if we missed a game because of her’

First day back. David Clifford sits behind a desk in the Sem in Killarney, ready for whatever the year has to throw at him. Or ready to get ready, maybe. This will be his second year as a teacher, his first taking a Leaving Cert PE class and he’s spent the morning getting back in the groove. Nothing says autumn like having to dig through the laptop for lesson plans.

Ultimately, the summer was one he’ll find it hard to forget, much as he might wish to. It wasn’t just that it ended with Kerry watching Dublin climb the steps of the Hogan Stand — Clifford has been an intercounty footballer for six seasons now and all but one of them have ended without Kerry winning Sam. It hurts but sport has its way with all of us sometimes.

The final is a month in the rearview at this stage and he already has two rounds of the Kerry club championship played with Fossa. He got away for a bit with the family too — his son Óigí turns two next Wednesday and they found a place somewhere down between Alicante and Benidorm where they didn’t see an Irish person for a week. A toddler in the family tends to set his own agenda, regardless of what you kicked or didn’t kick in Croke Park.

“It’s hard to maybe get your head around it and make sense of it,” Clifford says now of the final. “It was very disappointing for us on a team level but I suppose on a personal level as well. In football and in sport you’re going to have off days but it’s disappointing when the off days are on the biggest day.

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“But look, I suppose you’re just trying to take the learnings from it. And trying to … not move on in some sense because it will probably always stick with us. But to try to put your focus back into the club and focus back into different things.

“Ultimately we’re so results-focused and it was just the fact we didn’t get over the line and that I had chances to help us get over the line. That’s where the disappointment comes from. You’re trying to enjoy the process throughout the year but at the end of the day, you’re very focused on the result and getting the top prize. So then ultimately when we don’t get there, it’s just disappointment.”

When all comes to all though, 2023 isn’t really going to be about his battle with Mick Fitzsimons or his nine points against Derry or his catch-pass magic trick against Tyrone. It will always simply be the year he lost his mother. Cancer took her on the weekend of the Munster final and no image lingers from the season like the one of her youngest son lifting the cup in Limerick that Sunday. The Munster Council broke with tradition and spared him the captain’s speech. In every sense, he didn’t have to say a thing.

Ellen Clifford had just turned 60 a couple of weeks before her death. She was the third of 11 O’Shea children and grew up in Ballymacelligott, about five miles out the N21 from Tralee. She worked in the Department of Justice in Killarney for the best part of three decades, during which she met Dermot Clifford from Derrynane. They married and had three children — Paudie, David and Shelly.

She died in early May and because of who her sons are and what they’ve achieved, the whole country heard about it more or less instantaneously. The fact that Kerry had a Munster final the next day was there in the mix. But though Ellen Clifford’s death went far and wide, you needed to cup an ear and listen pretty hard to hear much about her life.

“She was football mad,” David says. “But she was also very comfortable watching any sport and very comfortable bringing us to whatever sport it was we were interested in. She had a sister in London and we would have often gone to London to go to Premier League games. We’d be going watching teams that we would have had no connection to at all. We just went for the experiences.

“Her family are GAA people. A couple of her sisters played at a very high level and her brothers would have played at a high level. Mom herself played more soccer. So she was very open to all sports. And that’s where probably the rest of us get our love for sports from.

“But in terms of personality, she would have been very quiet. Very selfless. She would have always hated for anything to be done for her. She wouldn’t ever want us to celebrate her birthdays or anything like that. That would have been putting people out. That was her.

“She was always great fun. She was always mad for listening to the stories of what we’ve been up to, maybe on a night out or something that happened at training. Different things like that. I suppose one thing that I always noticed about her was whenever you were coming to tell her a story and someone had done this or one of us had done that, she would have never commented about it either way. She’d sit there and let the story be told. I think she’d find out more that way.”

Like a lot of cancer deaths, there was nothing sudden about the end. They had plenty of time to get their heads around the fact that it was going to happen. Still, you never get to pick and choose this stuff. She died on Saturday, Kerry were playing Clare in the Munster final on Sunday. As a family, they didn’t agonise for too long over what to do.

“It was, of course, incredibly difficult,” Clifford says. “In terms of the game itself, myself and Paudie and my father just had a quick chat really. And the main reason that we went and played was we knew Mom would have hated to think that she was the reason that we missed the game.

“Even when she was going through her illness and she was in hospital for long periods, we’d be popping in after training or before training or whatever but she was always nearly pushing us out the door because she never wanted to be a hindrance. That was just her way.

“It could never be about her, it had to always be about us. Even when she was at her sickest, she’d still always be talking about how we were fixed for the weekend or was our gear washed for the weekend. She was so selfless like that. So I suppose a lot of the reason we decided to play was just thinking about that and knowing that she would have absolutely hated if we’d missed a game because of her.”

Anyone who was in the Gaelic Grounds that day could feel the emotion hanging over the place. The curtain-raiser was an intermediate camogie match between Kerry and Clare and the Cliffords stood watching a few minutes of it outside their dressing-room, down in the corner of the ground by the Ennis Road. Paudie kept his hood up, David had a peaked cap on. Their team-mates — probably without even realising it — rode shotgun on either side of them, protectively slagging away until it was time to get down to business.

When they got out on to the pitch, David scored 2-6, Paudie ran in a goal and Clare were swept away. At the final whistle, Kerry selector and noted giant Mike Quirke hastened out onto the pitch and brought David in behind the cordon of stewards that had formed at the foot of the presentation steps. He never minds signing jerseys for the armies of kids that come streaming towards him at full-time but Quirke made up his mind for him on this occasion. Small kindnesses mean everything.

“Our team as a whole and our management team — personally, I would have always felt we had a great connection. We have a great bond. But since that, thinking of where the lads have put their arms around us and kept doing it as the year has gone on, it just gives you so much more respect for the lads. And that’s saying something because of the respect we have for each other anyway.”

Everything moves on. The three months since then have been a whirl of championship and holidays and Óigí and back to school and still, somewhere in the cracks and crevices, he’s finding his way. Losing a parent is brutal for anyone but at least most of us get to do it in private. Most of us don’t have to go through it when we’re only 24. We definitely don’t have to go and try to win an All-Ireland while we’re trying to figure ourselves out.

“Look, it’s difficult,” he says. “The timing of it, the fact that we were in right in the middle of the season, busy with Kerry, the training and matches at times would have been a nice distraction. You got to go and put your focus into the training, take your mind off things for a couple of hours. So that was a welcome distraction.

“But really you’re just trying to look out for each other as a family. We never wanted to go and do the whole doom and gloom thing where you’re afraid to smile, you’re afraid to go anywhere. We just kind of decided that again, that’s not what Mom would have wanted. So we wanted to carry on and put the best foot forward as much as we can.

“And of course, there are times where you’re laying in bed and you’re kind of saying, ‘Jesus how is this real?’ or whatever. But you’re just trying to get through those times as best as possible.”

Football is there, always. The end of the intercounty season changes his rhythms from flash-frying to slow-cooking but he’ll still fuss over every plate he sends out. He likes that he can be a bit more present at home with Óigí, not always obsessing over the next session or drilling into the next piece of analysis.

His body hasn’t any particular blinking lights to keep an eye on either — those ludicrous hamstrings that allow that Cliffordian kneecap-to-forehead follow-through don’t even take all that much maintenance, apparently. The joys of being 24.

“No, there’s one hamstring activation exercise or mobility exercise that I do before every session and match. But that’s about the size of it. I wouldn’t be the best man for activation and all that sort of thing. I should probably do more.”

The season didn’t really end for him or for Paudie last year. They went from Kerry to Fossa to East Kerry and back to Fossa, all the way to January. Then they were back in with Kerry in a matter of weeks, all the way to July. And now it’s Fossa again, two wins from two in the intermediate club championship under their belt already. They play Glenflesk this weekend to decide who tops the group. In a couple of weeks, it’ll be East Kerry in the county championship. On and on it goes.

The Fossa adventure has been a marvel. For half a century, the club was a dot on the landscape of Kerry football. They waited half a century for someone to play senior championship for Kerry and then the Clifford brothers came along and made it two in two years.

They carried their bat through the Kerry junior championship last year, all the way to Croke Park and an All-Ireland title in January. They had their first ever home game in the intermediate championship last week against St Mary’s and ran up a 1-17 to 2-10 scoreline. The best of times.

“It’s a step up,” Clifford says. “You find in junior football that a team might have one or two forwards and one or two defenders. Now we’re finding that every team has four good forwards and four good defenders and a good midfielder. That hits you straight away.

“But the lads have been brilliant — they got promoted there from Division Three to Division Two in the county league and neither myself nor Paudie played a single game. That’s nearly a bigger achievement in itself. We’re kind of rolling with it. We don’t know where it’s going to end up — that’s what the greatest buzz about it is.”

Wherever it does, he’ll be at the centre of it. For Fossa, it must feel at times like they’ve struck oil in a bog. Imagine toiling away for 50 years with nobody paying the slightest bit of attention. Then, as if a stork dropped him on the porch one night, David Clifford arrives. Not just to do his thing and weave his spell when they get him the ball, but to push everyone, everywhere, on and off the pitch.

Talk to anyone who has worked with Clifford at any level and they all puff their cheeks at the easy question. How good is he? He’s as good as you think he is. Ask why and they light up. It’s the relentless work, it’s the ferocious chase. It’s all that unseen hunt for excellence. That’s what they talk about when they talk about David Clifford. So you ask him where he gets that drive.

“I think where a lot of it comes from is that I find it frustrating when I don’t hit standards,” he says. “Or when we, as a team, don’t hit standards. You know what I mean? I find it frustrating, I find that it’s in your head for a couple of days. But I suppose the flipside of that is the disappointment from that then is what leads you to go and do the extra kicking session or whatever. So I think that’s a large part of it.

“And then it’s just the whole thing of chasing success. I enjoy the process of going and trying to chase the success but it’s the times you have after the success — the time maybe in the dressing room after a win, after a game when you feel like it has gone well for you and for the team. It’s kind of chasing those situations too, probably where a lot of it comes from.

“But there’s a period after every disappointment where you’re feeling like … it’s not that you resent the game but it’s more that you don’t want to think about football for a few days. It never lasts very long and it nearly always comes around again then pretty quickly. And it drives you to go again, to go and find that improvement.”

The hunt never ends. For now, it’s time to start sorting out that lesson plan and drawing up a schedule for when the students of St Brendan’s mark the true end of summer and start arriving through the doors.

You’d have to imagine few enough of Mr Clifford’s PE class ever forget their gear.