Kerry, can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em

Yes, they've won enough, but now they've gone to that mythical part of the Kingdom populated by serial All-Ireland winners, something's missing, writes KEITH DUGGAN

I AM missing Kerry. Never dreamt it would happen but since Down came to Croke Park and gave an exhibition of football splendour they cannot help giving against Kerry, the days afterwards have been filled the kind of void old Winston Churchill used to describe as the Black Dog.

“Are you sure it’s not cos Saturday Night with Miriam is finishing up?” one friend asked, concerned.

But no, it wasn’t that. It was the sudden absence of Kerry in all of our lives. No more of them green and gold stripes!

No more of those loping runs from right back by Tomás Ó Sé which are all the more unbelievable because it never looks as if the lad is travelling particularly fast but nobody ever catches him.

No more ridiculous points from Colm Cooper or heart-on-sleeve afternoons from Paul Galvin, who always brought a welcome Sex Pistols-type edginess to GAA Sundays.

No more enjoying the fact pundits never quite had the guts to come out and brand Kerry as dirty even though half of them are dying to. No more of those Jack O’Connor grimaces before he answers a question. Sometimes after matches, Jack would listen to a question about the Gooch’s groin or Kieran Donaghy’s “vision” and he would grimace like Fletcher Christian at the wheel of the Bounty before giving a reply that was often wry and always wise.

Half the craic about Kerry football is not watching them win stuff but listening to them afterwards. They talk about All-Irelands and compare modern footballers with Kerry men from the 1940s and 1930s with such joy and at incredible speeds that is impossible and curmudgeonly not to be happy for them.

There is a touch of the decent amateur thespian in most Kerry men and all of them have acted in a John B Keane play at some point in their lives. They can sometimes be a little businesslike in their soliloquies when they win because they are so used to winning that it doesn’t so much give them a hashish blast as maintain the equilibrium. But in defeat they are always unbeatable. Losing is such a shock to the system that they become different men entirely.

Losing a championship match to a Kerry man is like being flung buck naked into Lake Huron to the rest of us. Páidí Ó Sé, on those relatively rare occasions when he had to cope with defeat as Kerry manager, was always at his most reflective and magnificent in the hour afterwards.

Often, his voice was little more than a whisper but his presence combined with the sheer weight of sadness emanating from him was such that if you transported him onto the stage of the Old Vic, he would have given the best incarnation of Hamlet since Larry* himself.

Kerry men always treat the loss of a championship match as something mystical. Losing falls between outright bereavement and rite of passage in their minds. This is partly because the rest of the country behaves as if something monumental has occurred when Kerry get beaten.

And on Saturday afternoon last, it was clear all over Ireland something strange and rare was happening. Down were kicking points at a faster rate than the Kerry men were and with more smoothness and Kerry men everywhere could feel that old Northern hoodoo enveloping them.

So the sky darkened and the crows were restless and at around 3.45pm Michael Lyster, anchor man on the Sunday Game Live, wore the kind of expression not seen on television since Walter Kronkite was tasked with informing America he had some news from Dallas. Everyone was in a state of mild shock that Kerry were, as we say with fatalistic Irish overstatement, "gone".

The immediate temptation is to assume none of these Kerry men will ever be seen again; that they will disappear into whatever parts of Kerry multi-All-Ireland winning Kerry footballers go to.

(I sometimes imagine there to be a secret town in Kerry, locatable only by a map hidden under Bomber Liston’s mattress and involving a hazardous trek over the Brandon to a place populated only by Kerry men who have won four or more All-Irelands – excluding substitutes or those won against Mayo – where their mission is to populate the county with future green and gold stars).

Naturally enough on Saturday last, when the press boys ganged around the crestfallen Kerry men, the question of “the future” would have been timidly broached. And they wanted no reflections on the cosmos or the Hadron Collider or that stuff. They wanted only to know if men like Tommy Griffin would be seen in a Kerry shirt again. As ever, the Kerry answers were enigmatic and poetic.

“Man’s yesterday will never be like his morrow,” Jack O’Connor said. “Nothing endures but mutability.”

Come to think of it, it might have been Shelley who said that but it hardly matters: it is just the sort of thing all Kerry people are likely to say when they find themselves freefalling out of the All-Ireland sky.

I have a good friend from Kerry. Everyone in the world has at least one good friend from Kerry: it is unavoidable. The man was supposed to be in Scotland for a few days, cycling across the Highlands. This is typical of the kind of lark that Kerry men get up to when they are not following the football team.

He hoped to get himself so thoroughly lost that he would be non-contactable so it is possible it took a few days for the text messages from other distraught Kerry folk to reach him. I fear for him, cycling through wild terrain in his Stacks shorts and a shirt he swapped with Pa Laide after a trial match in the 1990s. The news might be too much.

He had no idea Kerry would lose. He predicted Down would give his team “ a rattle” but he was optimistic the Kingdom would be around in September. After all, they have been around for the last six Septembers. It is likely the cycling was instantly abandoned at the nearest tavern and that even now some helpless Highlanders are hearing about why Ambrose O’Donovan from ’86 and Aeroplane O’Shea from ’14 were the kind of men you don’t meet everyday.

That Dublin went and won just an hour after Kerry went and lost simply adds salt to Kingdom wounds. What is the point of a Dublin renaissance if Kerry aren’t waiting for them on the third Sunday of September? Crafty, red-faced men from Sneem or Listowel in Gills pub early enough to get the best seats because, well, they have more experience of the Jones Road at this time of year than the Dubs. Can the Dubs even hope to extract the best from themselves if the green and gold is not there to incite and inspire them? Who knows?

The other day someone admitted out loud they were kind of missing Kerry.

“Why? I demanded sharply. “The b*****ds win enough.”

“Dunno,” he mumbled, “just do”.

He is right. Kerry, man. Can’t live with ’em. Can’t . . .

*Olivier in this instance, not O’Gorman.