We saw the All-Ireland champions in Killarney

GAA: THE MIDDLE THIRD:KILLARNEY FOR the Munster final is one of my favourite days of the year. The sun, the buzz, the match. You'd want to check for a pulse if you couldn't enjoy it. I ran into so many fellas that I wouldn't have seen for a year, everybody hopping balls, everybody full of chat. In the space of 100 yards walking down the street, I heard a dozen different opinions on the match. And this was before lunchtime.

There are characters everywhere you go on a day like that. I know a crowd from Listowel who come down from north Kerry through Castleisland and head back on a loop through Castlemaine. You could set your watch by the places they’d stop off. And once you’re in Killarney itself, you know where to find the different crowd because they go to the same pubs each time. The Tralee crowd will be in one place and the south Kerry crowd will be in another. You’d nearly want the Monday off if you wanted to visit them all.

It’s a great town for a match. The whole place gets taken over for it and the fact the pitch is in the town, just up the hill from the centre, makes it all the better. I came across plenty of different lads from up the country as I walked around. I met Gay Sheeran from Roscommon, Maurice Sheridan from Mayo, Seán Óg de Paor from Galway. Mick Galwey himself was down making a weekend of it.

For all that you’d enjoy it, I sensed plenty of pessimism on the streets and in the bars before the game. Most people I met couldn’t see a Kerry victory. It’s not that they were down on the players, more that they just didn’t know what level they were at. Partly, the pessimism came from just assuming the worst but as well as that there was the fact the manner of that Down defeat in Croke Park last year was playing on people’s minds.

You wouldn’t mind if Down had gone on to win the All-Ireland or competed in the Ulster championship this year. But since they lost the All-Ireland final and got well-beaten by Armagh in Ulster (who then got well-beaten themselves by Derry), you’d be inclined to wonder just how poor Kerry had been in Croke Park last year. When you go into a Munster final against Cork with questions like that in the back of your mind, I suppose it’s hard for people to be confident.

But you have to hand it to the Kerry lads – they answered plenty of questions on Sunday. People were wondering about their midfield but I thought they held their own. Alan O’Connor came into it for Cork big time in the second half and was probably the best of the midfielders on show by the end but Kerry at least broke even in the centre of the pitch. As I said here last week, Kerry just had to get men on the ball around that sector and feed their forwards. They did that in the first half and that’s what won them the game.

That first half wasn’t as dramatic or as perfect as the first half against Dublin in 2009 but in terms of movement, composure and score-taking, it was right up there with Kerry’s very best displays. Some of these players are some of the best players I’ve ever seen. I know I seem to mention Colm Cooper and Declan O’Sullivan every week here but they showed again on Sunday that they have this economy of decision-making that sets them apart from everyone else.

Gooch has got some bad press since the match with people saying he was very quiet. Maybe it looked that way on TV but sitting in the stand you could see what he was doing to orchestrate things. He scored a point in the first half where he took a ball at speed above his head in full stride, cut in on an angle towards goal, knocked it over the bar on his weaker right foot and made it look easy. If anyone else had scored it, we’d have been making a big deal over it because it wasn’t easy at all. But because it’s Colm Cooper and we expect miracles off him the whole time, it nearly goes unnoticed.

The Cork players noticed. At one point he went out to pick up a ball around the sideline and Michael Shields followed him out. But even as Shields – who is Cork’s best defender, remember, and an All Star for the last two years – was going with him, Pearse O’Neill was chasing back to help. Both of them were drawn to him and he just stood and waited to see where the free man was.

It was like that famous picture of Maradona with the Belgian defenders all looking at him wondering what he was going to do next. What he did was send Bryan Sheehan – O’Neill’s man – away with the ball. Now if that was somebody like me on the ball, Cork would have sent only one man. Instead they sent two and Kerry had a man over, purely because of the consternation Colm creates. Maybe he didn’t score a bagful on Sunday but he was a joy to watch all the same.

I really enjoyed the game. Maybe over the course of the match the stats might show that between breaking ball and fielding ball Cork came out on top in the middle. But what Kerry did in the first half was enough to get them over the line in the end.

In a funny way, both managers will come out of the game feeling they’ve achieved something. Conor Counihan won’t be happy with the defeat but he’ll be delighted with the test. The season has started now.

I think if we learned one thing on Sunday it’s that the 2011 All-Ireland champions were playing in Killarney. I wouldn’t be sure yet whether it will be Cork or Kerry but I’m more convinced now than I was before the game that it will certainly be one of them. They both went into the game as contenders and they both left it as contenders. Whereas a team like Tyrone, even though they only lost to Donegal a few weeks ago with a last-minute goal, left that game full of doubts.

Because of the nature of their second half, Cork’s stock rose on Sunday. Even though they lost, they walked away knowing they’re at worst the second best team in the country and even then, not by much. Dublin are the only other team I can see living with them apart from Kerry and if they do have to play the Dubs, there’s a good chance they will have the upper hand in the last 10 minutes if the game is close and some of Dublin’s players are wrecked.

Cork were always going to come back into it on Sunday. You have to say this much for them – they don’t do panic. They grind away and plan their way back into games, tapping over scores as they go. They don’t worry or go for goals too soon or any of that. They have confidence in each other and Counihan obviously has confidence in them. I think nearly everyone in the ground would have had Graham Canty off at half-time but he came more and more into the game in the second half in a different role.

He pushed forward and set up attacks and contributed to the comeback. That’s a tribute to his determination but also to Counihan’s faith in him.

That’s a sure sign of a team that knows what it’s doing. Don’t panic. Don’t lose the head. Keep your discipline and gradually work your way back one score at a time. Plenty of teams would have tried to do too much too quickly. They would have started lashing the ball in high in search of a goal. But Cork stuck to the way they like to play; got the likes of Paddy Kelly and Paul Kerrigan on the ball and got them running at the Kerry defence. They knew what they were doing and they trusted in what they knew.

If John Miskella had scored that goal, Cork would have won. But I was delighted to see Kerry take Cork’s period of dominance on the chin and kick on once Miskella missed. After not scoring for so long and seeing Cork grow into the game, it would have been easy for them to hide. And it was a joy to see Eoin Brosnan, a player who people were worried wasn’t going to be able to handle playing at half-back, take the initiative and surge forward to get the score that settled Kerry and won the game.

Both teams have plenty to do after Sunday. But I would be surprised if they have to worry too much about anybody apart from each other.