History shows Kingdom can come unstuck on home soil

Mayo travel to Tralee tomorrow looking to take down the Division One leaders. They and other counties have done it in the past, the trick is seizing the opportunity if it comes, writes KEITH DUGGAN

IN OCTOBER of 2000, the Louth manager, Paddy Clarke, brought his newly-promoted Division One team to Killarney for the opening match of the league against the All-Ireland champions.

Louth hadn’t visited the Kingdom since 1968 but just a month after Kerry had won a famous All-Ireland final replay against Galway, the Wee County did what few teams do. They won a football match in Kerry.

“We were talking to them about that match between the final and the replay,” Clarke had said on the weekend of that match. “It was just a matter of getting things finalised but, understandably enough, they were a bit incredulous at the other end, as if to say: here are we trying to win an All-Ireland and you are going on about a league game next season.”

A poor crowd turned up in Fitzgerald Stadium for that match and the more uncharitable view was that most of the home players didn’t turn up either, at least not in any way that mattered.

That 1-12 to 1-11 win was a rare instance of Kerry slipping up at home. Even during years when Kerry fields ordinary teams, they are a sticky prospect on their home patch, something that James Horan and Mayo will be well aware of as they head south for tomorrow’s game.

“One thing is certain about any team going to Kerry: they won’t lack motivation,” says John O’Mahony, who managed wins with both Galway and Mayo on Kerry soil.

“Teams want to test themselves against the best and you are trying to get your own performance right and it helps because your players are going to be switched on playing Kerry.”

Armagh’s win against Kerry in Tralee this February arguably matched Mayo’s recent deconstruction of Dublin as the most impressive result in the league. The 2-8 to 0-10 scoreline was stark and afterwards Jack O’Connor couldn’t put it down to anything other than Kerry’s failure to rise themselves for the game.

“It was a shock for people but I think people understood that they were on a bit of a high after winning in Dublin the previous week,” says Willie O’Connor, the long-time Kerry County Board member who was at that match.

“That was an important game because of what happened in the All-Ireland final.”

And even so, it has done nothing to alter the expected trajectory of the league, with Kerry sweeping to four victories after that setback against Armagh. That is what gives the visit of Mayo such an edge: more than any county, they have all the ammunition they need to be motivated to play Kerry.

The link between league and championship success had been emphasised in recent years but it has always been part of the Kerry methodology. They won the winter competition for four years running, 1971-74, before they went on the rampage for a decade of summers after that.

In 1995, when Páidí Ó Sé was attempting to jump-start the football fortunes of his county, he pointed out how much the football landscape had changed since then. Kerry had not won the league since 1984.

“The days are gone when you could play Tipperary over the telephone,” he said.

He made these remarks just before Meath visited Killarney and won, 2-11 to 2-8. “Kerry supporters have high standards but Kerry don’t have a divine right to be in Croke Park every year,” Ó Sé pointed out that evening. But he used the league to rebuild a good team. Just two years later, they beat Cork in the league final. It was their first national title of any sort since 1986.

“It’s only the league but it was important to us. It is a reward for an amount of work we had done,” Ó Sé said.

By September, they were All-Ireland champions again.

Ó Sé had won his second All-Ireland as manager when that Louth match was played. Kerry’s failure to tap into their A game was forgivable: an entire generation of Kingdom youngsters was new to the whole homecoming lark.

For players like Darragh Ó Sé and Dara Ó Cinnéide, who had broken through when the Kerry pulse had flatlined, the success was also remarkably new. Nobody was too concerned about the league. But that minor setback against Louth set them listing: Tyrone crushed them in Omagh and then Offaly handed them a 1-18 to 0-10 beating, results hardly befitting the All-Ireland champions.

When they came back after the winter break, they went to Roscommon and it was more of the same: a 0-11 to 0-7 win and the fourth defeat of the campaign. Relegation loomed and Kerry duly dropped.

But they got their act together when it mattered: Tom Carr brought a Dublin team to Kerry for a tough match that April which finished 2-9 to 0-10. Ian Robertson suffered a broken leg that day in one of the many disruptions to a promising career.

That win was the high point: their campaign ended on a 1-18 to 2-9 loss to Galway in Salthill and Kerry’s championship defence ended when they managed just five points against Meath in one of the strangest All-Ireland semi-finals ever.

The following year, Kerry went on a league tour of exotic lands and promptly returned to Division One the following year, winning three of the next seven titles.

When O’Mahony brought a young Mayo team to Tralee in 2010, Kerry were the league and All-Ireland champions. It was, ironically, the monumental scare that Sligo gave them in the All-Ireland qualifying match the previous July which had jolted them into life.

They survived that day in Tralee by the skin of their teeth, relying on a superb save by Diarmuid Murphy from a penalty by David Kelly to scrape through.

They lost on the opening day against Dublin, giving the metropolitans their first victory on Kerry soil since 1982.

Then, in late March, Mayo managed to surprise everyone by handing Kerry their second home defeat.

“I think that day Tom Parsons got a goal that clinched it and Conor Mortimer came on and got a scatter of points. As the game progressed, we grew in confidence. There is a perception that Kerry are invincible, particularly at home. But the penny dropped with our guys on the field that they weren’t on that particular day . . . that they are human and all that goes with it and we took advantage of that,” O’Mahony recalls.

“I think Kerry teams are often far more focused going up to Tyrone say, than at home. In my experience of travelling down there with Galway and Mayo, they never play like a team under pressure at home.

“So in a league setting, there is always a chance that you might just catch them unawares.”

But it seldom happens like that.