'Gaelic football owes a debt of gratitude to Kerry'
Analysis: No Kerry team has ever taken the field without belief in its ability, which is why the county has been so successful
By Diarmuid O'Donovan
One of my favourite stories about Kerry GAA comes from 1911. In March that year, Dr Crokes of Killarney met Mitchels of Tralee in a delayed championship game from the previous year. The game was intense and the scores were close. A dispute arose between the teams during the second half. Crokes and Kerry star, Dick Fitzgerald, led his Crokes team off the field.
This turned out to be a grave error. The GAA's Central Council had recently ruled that "any team that walks off the field will forfeit the game and be subject to an automatic six-month suspension from all competition". The reality of the situation did not dawn on Crokes until it was too late. The new rule meant that Crokes would miss the 1911 County Championship, and the Crokes players, including Dick Fitzgerald, could not play for Kerry.
In an effort to retrieve the situation, Fitzgerald attended a subsequent meeting of the Kerry Board where the draws for the 1911 County Championship were taking place. He pleaded for leniency and managed to persuade the Board to agree to include Crokes in the championship draw, and that they would not play their first round until late September, when the suspension had been served. To quote Fitzgerald's biographer, Tom Looney, this was "a Kerry solution to a Kerry problem!"
From RTÉ Radio 1's Today with Claire Byrne, retired Dublin footballer Robbie Kelleher and historian Mark Duncan discuss the Hell for Leather – The Story of Gaelic Football series
Cork became the short-term beneficiaries of all this. Waterford defeated Kerry in the Munster Championship. Cork then defeated Waterford and went on to win the All-Ireland title. It was short-term because it would be another 32 years before Cork would defeat Kerry in senior football, and 34 years before Cork won another All-Ireland title.
This story sums up everything that is tangible and visible about Kerry football. It has fierce and bitter local rivalries, stubbornness, guile, cunning, a drive to never, ever make the same mistake twice and, most of all, an innate ability to overcome any difficulty or situation for the sake of football.
Kerry football was slow off the mark in terms of winning All-Ireland titles. The All-Ireland Championships began in 1887, but Kerry won only one Munster Championship (1892) before the turn of the 20th century. The first All-Ireland came in 1903. That win rooted Gaelic football in the Kerry psyche, and 38 All-Ireland titles have been won since then, an average of a title almost every three years.
A little more than a decade after the "Fitzgerald Solution", Kerry became the scene of some of the bitterest fighting and atrocities of the Civil War. Yet, the scars of this dark time were never allowed to intrude on the Kerry senior football team. In his book In the Name of the Game, J.J. Barrett tells the story of how Free State soldiers such as Con Brosnan and Johnny Walsh played side by side with Anti-Treaty soldiers such as John Joe Sheehy and Joe Barrett. Brosnan was an army officer and organised a pass between noon and 6.00pm on Sundays to allow Sheehy, Barrett and others to play football.
This does not mean that there were not strong differences of political opinion between these men (there certainly were). What it does show is that their desire to play for Kerry could overcome these differences. Barrett captained Kerry to the 1929 All-Ireland final. When the captaincy came his way again in 1931, he organised, in the face of fierce opposition from republican elements across the county, that the captaincy would be given to his old adversary and football colleague, Brosnan. Barrett was captain again in 1932 when Kerry won its fourth consecutive title.
During that time and throughout the 1930s, Kerry used their fame to tour the United States and raise funds for the building of Austin Stack Park in Tralee and Fitzgerald Stadium in Killarney (named after the Dick Fitzgerald from earlier).
Kerry were fortunate to have Dr Eamonn O'Sullivan in charge of the Kerry teams from the1920s to the 1960s. He is regarded as the developer of modern team management in the GAA. His innovations, such as collective training and tactical awareness, were often the decisive contribution to Kerry All-Ireland wins.
By the 1940s, Cork football was sufficiently organised to stymie Kerry's annual run through the Munster Championship. Cork won Munster titles in 1943, '45, '49, '52, '56 and '57, unprecedented success by Cork standards. Kerry's response was to win eight successive Munster championships and two All-Ireland titles between 1958 and 1965.
During that run a new threat emerged for Kerry, namely Ulster football. Kerry did defeat Armagh in the 1953 All-Ireland final but lost to Derry in 1958 (semi-final) and the subsequence emergence of Down in the 1960s posed a new problem. Down beat Kerry, not just once, but in the 1960 final, the 1961 semi-final and again in the 1968 final (to this day, Kerry have never beaten Down in their five championship meetings).
From RTÉ News, Michael Ryan reports from Tralee as Kerry bring Sam Maguire back to the Kingdom in 1985
The Ulster question went away for the remainder of the 20th century and Kerry tacked on 11 more All-Ireland titles between 1969 and 1999. This included the four-in-a-row between 1978 to 1981 and a controversial loss to Offaly in 1982. Ulster teams have re-emerged this century however, in the form of Armagh (who beat Kerry in the 2002 final), Tyrone (beginning in 2003 semi-final and several more times since), and Donegal (2012 QF).
The restructuring of the All-Ireland championships since 2001 and the introduction of various forms of All-Ireland qualifiers has meant Kerry are no longer subject to a knockout blow from Cork, or the occasional ambush from Waterford or Tipperary, as happened in 1911, 1928 or 1957. This has helped rather than hindered the Kerry insatiable quest for All-Ireland titles.
Kerry have lifted the Sam Maguire cup seven times since 2000. That's an average of one every 3.5 years; a rate almost as good as the success rate since the first title in 1903. It is a success rate achieved in spite of ongoing issues with Ulster football, and Dublin's nine All-Ireland titles between 2011 and 2023 (Kerry lost to Dublin in four of these finals).
From RTÉ Archives, a 1984 edition of The Sunday Game looks at Kerry football dominance including two four in a row All Ireland title wins from 1929 to 1932 and 1978 to 1982
Gaelic football owes a debt of gratitude to Kerry. The county had shown the ability to surmount civil unrest, economic depression, emigration, the intense rivalry of its internal inter-club competitions and the intense efforts of almost every other county to defeat them.
No Kerry team has ever taken the field without belief in its ability, and the intention to do everything possible to win the game. That is ultimately why Kerry has been so successful. That is why, as a football fan I love them and, as a Corkman, I have very mixed emotions.
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Irish Examiner
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