GAELIC GAME:It's a long and winding road to the big time and it has to start somewhere. Just ask Donegal's under-21 star Michael Murphy, writes Darragh Ó Sé
I WATCHED the under-21 game at the weekend. It was a real struggle between two counties who badly needed a win. If one county’s hunger was greater than the other it was Donegal’s. They wanted this one.
They went back to the same old style that Donegal always fall back on though. They had Michael Murphy, who appears to be the finest young footballer in the country, stuck up front and they spent the whole evening hand-passing the ball up the field till they could get it to him.
Only late on, when they hit the wire and found themselves in a bit of trouble, did they start to kick the ball. The damage was done by then.
So poor old Michael Murphy got left with a last-minute penalty to win an All-Ireland title for his team. He missed and he’ll be gutted.
He should listen to the cliché though. The experience will make him stronger. You have to lose before you learn how to win. He got a hard lesson on Saturday night but he should remember he is a lot of the reason that Donegal got to the final in the first place – and that they didn’t lose the final because he missed the penalty.
If they had varied their play a bit more they wouldn’t have needed a penalty in those circumstances.
It’s a hard one for a young fella to swallow at the time but I was captain a couple of times of teams which lost by a point. When it is over it is over and the feeling I always had was that I couldn’t wait for the next day to come.
It doesn’t really matter what you lose by – you want the next day to come so you can go out and put it right. Murphy owes his team nothing. He played superbly well and with honesty and commitment and that is all he could do.
He is 21 but he is a man before his time. His success at senior level last year reminds us of how exceptional he is. It’s rare these days to see an established senior footballer achieving success at the under-21 grade. The game has become so muscular and physical that even under-21s generally need a year or so in a senior set-up before they are ready to play. It used to be the case that a lot of under-21s made the senior team before they finished at under-21.
I’m not sure that we haven’t gone too far in that direction. Anyway, the beauty of an under-21 win is that of all the underage grades it gives you the most obvious and reliable indicator of what is coming up through the ranks behind.
If Donegal are as pleased as they should be with Murphy, Dublin will be very encouraged by the performance of young Rory O’Carroll in holding him. The desperation to get O’Carroll into the senior set-up even last summer before he went to America suggests he has been identified as the real deal.
The testing to find out just who is the real deal and who isn’t gets going for real now. Lads will be glad that the break between league and the championship is at an end and there are no more of the phoney wars that challenge games become.
Kerry played Laois behind doors at Killarney at the weekend and you pays your money and takes your choices with what to believe about who played well and who didn’t. These games are tough for players. Who knows what is going to happen when you go out for a challenge like that? Who knows what stage the other team are at? What they are looking at or trying out?
Kerry learned their own little bit. Laois learned theirs. Nobody saw the game but everybody else will have their own version.
For Kerry it’s even trickier just now. They have Tipperary in the Munster championship on Sunday week.
Now if you are a Tipp person reading this you will get some value but, being honest, Kerry should be beating Tipperary. Of course Tipp will be up for it and well-prepared with John Evans in charge, but even so there is no glory in it.
It is a game of negatives. And Evans will know this. Kerry should beat Tipp well and if they do, the first thing that will be said is “Tipp had nothing”. “Very poor.” Some people will say, “yerra Kerry are flying” but they’ll shake their heads and say, “flying, but too early to be flying”.
If it’s a tough game, Kerry will get written off.
All this puts a pile of pressure on players who have to go into a real game then against Cork a few weeks later. Fellas often don’t play well in these games but they would be way more concerned about it if they didn’t play well against Cork.
Which is part of the problem in the first place.
It is even trickier for management who are trying to prepare their team on two levels.
Management will increase the dosage in training sessions around now because they have to get a bit of work done for down the road.
It’s a risk that has to be taken, so often you go into those games not quite tired but not as fresh and tuned in as you would be. For players and management, while they are doing the utmost it is a very hard one to get right.
The fact that the game is not at home and they have to go to Semple Stadium will go against Kerry too. When you are away and things aren’t going well the crowd smells blood.
We played Tipp in similar circumstances when I was starting out. Clonmel in 1996. It was the first game in charge for P Ó Sé (the uncle) and we weren’t established as a force. Tipp hadn’t beaten us since 1928 in championship but they should have beaten us that day. I was midfield with John O’Connell from Tarbert and we never got to grips with Brian Burke and Derry Foley. We were behind at half-time and we went further behind after the break.
With about seven or eight minutes to go I remember a Tipp back made a mistake and Dara Ó Cinnéide scored a goal with a drop kick. We pushed on from there to finish well enough. The uncle took him aside afterwards.
“Dara I saw you once trying that as a minor and it didn’t work. Now it worked today but I never want to see it again.”
This will be an odd week for the lads working away in Fitzgerald Stadium. They will know that in recent years Tipperary haven’t been the Mae West but that they have good players. There would be a sense of shock if Tipp gave Kerry a tough 70-minute game but nobody in Kerry would be that offended either. It could happen.
Which makes it the worst kind of game to get ready for but, as Michael Murphy will know, this week it’s a long and winding road to the big time and it has to start somewhere.
