Lyons's record is better than average

Saturday's meeting of Dublin and Kerry might have depressed the historical average of great matches between the counties but it very much conformed to the overall trend.

As the figures stand Kerry lead the 21 championship fixtures with their ancient rivals by 15 wins to six.

This chasm between the counties demonstrates the extent to which the pairing relies on the 1970s to give substance to its image of titanic struggle.

In fact it's worse if you adjust the figures to take into account the fact that Dublin's heyday was in the early decades of the GAA's existence whereas Kerry began to accumulate titles only when Dublin's star was in decline. A few simple statistics bear out the extent of this.

Dublin had won six All-Irelands before Kerry won their first and by 1923 the score was 14-5 in the capital's favour. But then the plates shifted.

In the extraordinarily productive era that followed, Kerry won 10 All-Irelands in 18 seasons - a strike rate equalled between 1969 and 1986, largely on the back of Mick O'Dwyer's tremendous successes - and by 1941 had overtaken Dublin at the top of the roll of honour.

Since then football's leading county has motored off over the horizon, more than doubling their total while Dublin have added only eight more titles - a strike rate of little over one a decade or eight in 80 years.

During those decades Dublin's only victories against Kerry came in 1976 and 1977, leaving a negative balance of 2-12.

Which prompts the question: are Dublin's expectations perennially too high? Everything is considered in the here and now but against the going rate Tommy Lyons's management has done all right.

The 2002 Leinster title was the first in seven years and although it has gone unsurpassed in the meantime, three of the six management teams that preceded Lyons failed to win even one provincial title. Two of the remaining three won just one and only Pat O'Neill, with three out of three, has a better track record.

Furthermore, Dublin hadn't won a single under-21 provincial title in 18 years when Lyons took over but since then he has been involved in back-to-back Leinsters and the county's first All-Ireland at the grade.

Of course what militates against him is the deterioration of results and performances since his first year, but taken as a three-year period the record is better than average and refutes some of the wilder allegations about where Dublin stand at the end of his current appointment.

The upcoming All-Ireland semi-finals may not pack the same nostalgic punch but neither are they bereft of historical context. Although the counties met at the same stage 28 years ago when Kerry as defending All-Ireland champions whacked Derry by 16 points (in fairness to the Ulster side, less than the average beating O'Dwyer's team handed out in semi-finals during the 1970s), the outstanding memory is from 1958.

Derry had just won the county's first Ulster title and only earlier in the decade had recorded a first win in a match at senior championship level.

In the pre-television days knowledge of opponents was scanty and largely confined to direct experience.

As a result neither team knew a great deal about the other. The story goes that Kerry's scout to the Ulster final arrived too late after his car had broken down.

Anyway, on the day of the semi-final it rained so heavily that the pre-match parade was abandoned and scoring was slow.

A goal before half-time by Denis McKeever gave Derry a 1-4 to 1-2 interval lead and a certain confidence although they had played with the wind. McKeever's brother Jim gave an outstanding display at centrefield until he was eclipsed in the second half by the switch of a young Mick O'Connell.

With a hugely enhanced share of possession Kerry peppered their opponents but the most telling statistic to emerge was Kerry's 17 wides as against four from Derry.

It was another O'Connell, Derry's Seán, however, who made the big impact. With his side just about hanging on to a one-point lead in foul conditions with three minutes left, O'Connell snatched a goal to put the Ulster champions more than a score ahead. Kerry stepped up the barrage and Tadhg Lyne scrambled a goal in injury time. But the whistle went on the kick-out.

Derry lost to Dublin in the final but Kerry, after two years of making the wrong sort of history (the previous year had seen the even more astonishing defeat by Waterford), went on to win the following year's All-Ireland.

This coming weekend may be Fermanagh's first All-Ireland semi-final but their football history has crossed paths with Mayo's. Prior to the past two seasons, the high point of Fermanagh's existence came 69 years ago this month when they contested their only senior national final.

The National Football League that year was organised on peculiar lines, with a Division One group featuring most of the country's best teams and drawn from Connacht and Leinster, a Munster group contesting the McGrath Cup and an Ulster group.

Mayo won the first group and played off against Tipperary, who had also won the Munster championship that year (for the last time to date) in the absence of Kerry, who withdrew from all competition in protest at the treatment of republican prisoners in the Curragh.

Having beaten Tipperary, Mayo (at this stage chasing a third successive league title) faced Ulster group winners Fermanagh. The year 1935 was a notable one for the northern county, which still remains one of only two counties in Ireland not to have won a senior provincial championship.

In all Fermanagh have contested only four Ulster finals and that year was their first since 1914. They gave a good account of themselves by coming back strongly at a Cavan side that would win the All-Ireland that September. Contemporary accounts suggest that with better finishing they would have completed the revival and actually won the title.

They were assisted by the picaresque Jim McCullagh, whose job in the Northern Ireland Electricity Board enabled him move around a few counties (he had previously played for his own county, Armagh, and Tyrone) and according to legend avoid any suspensions accumulated on his travels.

Fermanagh had won the McKenna Cup in 1933 and faced Mayo in the National Football League final two years later. It isn't the happiest precedent for Charlie Mulgrew's team in that they were savaged by the holders. Paddy Moclair and Gerald Courell shared five goals between them as their team won by 21 points, 5-8 to 0-2.

A year later Mayo won their first All-Ireland whereas Fermanagh football slid back. For most of the 1940s and 1950s the county was graded junior, winning Ulster at that level in 1943 - when there was no All-Ireland series because of the war - and repeating the feat in 1959, when they also won the All-Ireland.

There are very few pairings of counties with absolutely no history between them but it's great to be able to freshen it up from time to time.