Ulster teams have troubled Kerry over the last decade and now Donegal get their chance to emulate their provincial rivals' success, writes SEAN MORAN

THE EARLY years of the GAA didn’t give many clues to what would become a fascinating rivalry. Kerry sustained just one championship defeat against an Ulster county in the first 49 years of the association’s history. Even that comes with its green-and-gold asterisk.

One hundred years ago this month, on the eve of the 1912 All-Ireland semi-final against Antrim, the Munster champions were tempted by the wedding in Dublin of a well-known Kerry man. Weighing the prospective entertainment against what was contemporarily described as a “matter-of-form” match the following day, the team succumbed to temptation.

The same contemporary source ruefully reported the outcome. “But the road to football, or any other success, is the hard and narrow patch. The day following the nuptials the Kerry boys could not play football. Antrim won 3-5 to two points – perhaps the most sensational GAA result of all time.”

There aren’t, however, enough examples of Kerry frivolity to adequately explain the disproportionate difficulty experienced by the greatest of all football counties in playing Ulster opposition. In All-Ireland finals against northern counties, Kerry are coming in at 40 per cent success whereas the balance sheets with the other two provinces are well in credit.

Why? Events like those of 1912 aren’t the mainstay of the statistics. Aside from the fact that it was a semi-final, as was the 1958 match with Derry (see panel), Ulster counties have won their finals against Kerry overwhelmingly because they were better teams with better preparation and tactics.

Even when Ulster counties lost finals to Kerry there were frequently sharp regrets: Cavan’s disallowed ‘winner’ in the 1937 draw, Armagh’s missed penalty in ’53 and Tyrone’s out-of-the blue challenge in ’86.

The last 50 years in particular have brought into focus a clash of styles and traditions that continues this weekend with tomorrow’s eagerly anticipated All-Ireland quarter-final against Donegal – the only Ulster county yet to face Kerry in championship.

The modern era has been one in which Kerry’s permanent government has been challenged by new ideas and that narrative begins with Down, the only county with a 100 per cent championship record against Kerry.

Art McRory managed the Tyrone team that threatened a seismic shock in 1986. They led by seven points in the second half before inexperience and injuries combined with the last despairing kick of Mick O’Dwyer’s legendary team to haul Kerry to victory. He remembers the emergence of Down in 1960.

“That Down team was so exceptional that it would have been very successful in any era. They were truly magnificent and didn’t win as many All-Irelands as they should have done

“They were a step ahead of everyone in the early 1960s and had good people in charge, like Maurice Hayes and Barney Carr. I heard Maurice Hayes at a seminar laying out how they had drawn up a five-year plan – A, B and C – to secure success. But they had to have the players.” said McRory.

Down had the players but they also had a curious ebullience for a county with no real tradition. They were both modern and scientific. They dressed uniformly in tracksuits, broke the game down into detail and analysed how to optimise their prospects.

Maurice Hayes, who went on to become a distinguished public servant on both sides of the Border, wrote about the 1960 final in Weeshie Fogarty’s 2007 book on the legendary Kerry trainer Dr Eamonn O’Sullivan, who, although he wasn’t in charge in 1960, had established himself as the foremost thinker in the game.

“Now one of the things we played on for that game was the fact that Dr Eamonn had a theory of zones. People kept to their places and you did not move out of that zone and what we introduced into Gaelic football was mobility. So your full back or half back could move up with the ball and even make or get a score. I think it took Kerry a bit of time to come to grips with this change. In the late 1950s and early 1960s there was a certain static quality about Kerry football.

“Now one of the things we attempted to do was play Mick O’Connell out of the game because Leo Murphy’s kick-outs were so long.” Art McRory amplifies the point: “The one weakness in the Down team was that they didn’t have a big, traditional midfield so they chose to break ball all the time. Their half backs and half forwards had a far greater awareness of this and won a lot of those breaks. They were coached at a time when it was totally and absolutely unknown. Teams ‘trained’ and training was catch and kick.”

In Kerry there developed an indignation at the emerging, new game. Not alone was the county the most successful in the game but it also had established a sort of intellectual copyright on the game.

Founding father Dick Fitzgerald, after whom the stadium in Killarney is named, wrote the very first coaching manual, How to Play Gaelic Football in 1914 and Dr O’Sullivan’s The Art and Science of Gaelic Football was published 44 years later, promulgating the importance of catch-and-kick and fixed position play – the very orthodoxies Down sought to undermine.

Furthermore Down produced their own coaching manifesto, Coaching for Gaelic Football Champions written by Down player Joe Lennon. Resentfully portrayed as the Professors of Gormanston, the school where Lennon taught and where the pioneering coaching courses of the 1960s were held, the apostles of the new age were not popular in Kerry.

One of the most fascinating dynamics in the relationship between Kerry and Ulster is paradoxically the naivete of northern counties. Nowhere is respect for Kerry’s football tradition and status more pronounced than in Ulster. Brian McEniff played for Donegal, managed the county to its only All-Ireland 20 years ago and for years managed Ulster’s Railway Cup teams. He’s sorry tomorrow’s encounter didn’t come sooner.

“It’s a regret I would have about 1992 and that era that we never got to play Kerry. I would have loved to have drawn them but we never got the opportunity. As a young boy growing up we used to always feel Kerry were simply physically too strong for Ulster teams but having played against them I realised it was just that they were better. I’d have a great respect for Kerry. They’ve produced great teams.”

But that tradition is built on competitiveness and tough-minded decision making. When challenged and bettered by northerners, Kerry – curiously for the purveyors of cuteness and its attendant ‘Yerra’ protocols – prove less emollient than might be expected. At times it seems that Ulster football people are almost wounded by the lack of recognition and how their innovations are often characterised as barbaric departures.

Mick O’Dwyer’s acerbic recollections of Down in the 1960s are well publicised and one of his team-mates, Tom Long, said of Down in a 2003 interview with Weeshie Fogarty: “They were the first side to bring the professional look to the game; even the way they dressed was different. They were a great footballing side like the team of Kerry’s golden years but they were spoilers and well-tutored in the art of fouling and breaking the ball at midfield.”

Current Kerry manager Jack O’Connor, writing shortly after the 2005 All-Ireland defeat by Tyrone, fulminated in his memoir Keys to the Kingdom: “There’s an arrogance to northern people which rubs Kerry people up the wrong way. They’re flash and nouveau riche and full of it. Add up the number of All-Ireland titles the Ulster counties have won and it’s less than a third of Kerry’s total but northern teams advertise themselves well.

“They talk about how they did it, they go on and on about this theory and that practice as if they’d just split the atom. They build up a mythology about themselves. That doesn’t sit well in Kerry where a man with four All-Ireland medals would quietly defer to another man who has five.”

Time, however, lends perspective. Mickey Ned O’Sullivan captained Mick O’Dwyer’s first All-Ireland winning team and later managed the county. He said: “In the 1960s Joe Lennon became a great thinker about the game. He was the first to go abroad and study physical education, in particular strength and conditioning. He was also interested in how other games approached preparation. In Kerry we always felt players grew on trees: pick them and they’ll do it on the field.”

O’Sullivan sees the last two decades, which have been the most successful era for Ulster football with eight All-Irelands spread amongst five counties, as proof that the northern threat is more than the emergence of good teams but something deeper.

“Ulster counties began in the last 20 years to get ahead of the rest of the country in terms of the scientific approach to sport. There has also been the influence of the political situation – the importance of the GAA to their identity and the renewed sense of confidence it has brought them.”

Tyrone’s storming of the citadel in 2003 and the two subsequent defeats of Kerry in All-Ireland finals triggered much the same outrage as Down’s emergence three decades earlier but O’Sullivan says there was much to admire about Mickey Harte’s team.

“I felt a great respect for the ability of the Tyrone management in 2003. That team managed to create pressure and close down space and they had their own offensive patterns. Tactically they were thinking a lot more . . . closing down space before we’d even thought about it. They were just better and it took a while for people to accept this.

“In Kerry it was always felt that once we had the ball, we always had the talent to do the business with it but we were slow to appreciate the importance of what you do when you haven’t got the ball. They were also interested in the tackle before we were even aware of its significance. They were judging players by how many tackles they were making; we were always looking at how the attack was functioning. It’s like the great basketball coach John Wooden said: ‘Offence wins games. Defence wins championships’.”

Armagh beat Kerry in the 2002 All-Ireland final and had nearly beaten them two years previously in the semi-finals. Brian Canavan, now a BBC radio analyst, was joint manager in 2000. He believes recent successes have emboldened Ulster teams and that the process has quickened since the championship format changed. “The fear element went out of it. The back-door system showed people Kerry could be vulnerable. Before that they were sometimes seen as up on a pedestal. In 2000 I was nearly afraid of them because in those days there wasn’t the same video analysis and it was before people started to delve into it as much. The feeling now in Ulster is that if you get Kerry in a close game, nine times out of 10 you’ll beat them.”

Beating Kerry once is all very well but one of the most consistent themes of football history is that the county learns fast. In his book Jack O’Connor, having taken a pop at northern counties’ sense of themselves, added: “If you can lose an All-Ireland on turnover ball like we did last year it makes sense to work as tightly as Tyrone and Armagh do on tackling and dealing with being tackled.”

Mickey Ned O’Sullivan says it’s at the heart of the county’s evolution. “Kerry have always learned, taken the best of what Ulster has to offer and modified it to suit their own style. It’s an inverted compliment. Every time we play an Ulster team we tend to learn something and that looks like continuing.”

And on it goes, tomorrow at four.

Kerry's Ulster question: four occasions when the kingdom's quest for sam was halted by the men from the north

August 27th 1933, Breffni Park

ALL-IRELAND SEMI-FINAL

Cavan 1-5 Kerry 0-5

Although the Polo Grounds final in 1947 provided Cavan with their most famous – and perhaps the most iconic of all – All-Ireland victory over Kerry, this contest was in some ways more significant.

It was the first of two occasions on which a Kerry's five-in-a-row bid failed and it provided Cavan with the launching pad to win Ulster's first All-Ireland.

After four successive All-Irelands, Kerry were in decline but had still enough in reserve to win Munster whereas Cavan had been knocking on the door, reaching All-Ireland semi-finals in the previous two years.

In a tight match, Cavan only pulled clear with two minutes left when Vincent McGovern either kicked or punched – there are conflicting accounts – a late goal.

Even then Tim Landers had time to flash a shot wide. Cavan's first Sam Maguire was won four weeks later in the first final not to feature a county from either Munster of Leinster.

August 24th 1958, Croke Park

ALL-IRELAND SEMI-FINAL

Derry 2-6 Kerry 2-5

This is an example of an Ulster team completely blindsiding Kerry. Derry had just won the county's first Ulster title and only earlier in the decade had recorded a first ever victory in a match at senior championship level.

On the day of the match it rained so heavily that the pre-match parade was abandoned. Scoring was slow and Derry led 1-4 to 1-2 at the break.

Jim McKeever gave an outstanding display at centrefield until he was eclipsed in the second half by the switch of a young Mick O'Connell.

The most telling statistic to emerge was Kerry's 17 wides as against four from Derry.

With Derry hanging on to a one-point lead in the wretched conditions with three minutes left, Seán O'Connell snatched a goal and whereas Kerry's Tadhg Lyne scrambled a goal in injury-time the final whistle went on the kick-out. Derry lost to Dublin in the final.

Sept 25th 1960, Croke Park

ALL-IRELAND FINAL

Down 2-10 Kerry 0-8

Until the advent of Tyrone, Down were the definitive Ulster challenge for Kerry. Tactically innovative and more aware of the evolving physical demands of top-class sport, Down had served a brief apprenticeship in winning Ulster the previous year and losing the All-Ireland semi-final to Galway. They laid down a marker in the 1960 league semi-final by beating Kerry at Croke Park.

Down were ready, according to one of their most distinguished players, Team of the Millennium selection Seán O'Neill: "When we arrived on the pitch the roar of the crowd was unbelievable, like waves of electricity going through us. As for the final itself we were as they say now 'in the zone,' very focused and not afraid of the game. We weren't there to put up a good show."

The counties have met five times in championship and Down have won the lot, including when distant outsiders in the quarter-finals of two years ago.

August 24th 2003, Croke Park

ALL-IRELAND SEMI-FINAL

Tyrone 0-13 Kerry 0-6

The iconic image of this semi-final was of Tyrone's swarm defence circling its Kerry prey. The cultural battle lines were drawn by RTÉ pundit and former Kerry player Pat Spillane describing the Ulster champions' style as "puke football".

It was no real surprise. Kerry had been rattled by another Ulster defeat at the hands of Armagh the previous September and had looked out of ideas when losing to Tyrone in that year's league encounter in Killarney.

Mickey Harte's team had serious momentum: a clutch of underage All-Irelands, the 2003 NFL and a season-long unbeaten record.

Although Tyrone's shutting down of both space and opponents were important, their attack cut through the opposition in the first quarter and established a 0-5 to nil lead. Captain Peter Canavan had to go off injured early in the match and Tyrone's tactics became more cautious.

They would defeat Kerry again in two All-Ireland finals, retribution for which arrived only last month.

Seán Moran