Dara Ó Cinnéide: ‘I'm getting sick of this #WeAreKerry stuff. What does it actually mean anymore?'
Dara Ó Cinnéide was in Tullamore last weekend, watching the
Kerry
game alongside an old college friend from
Meath
. On the way up the road, there was campfire gossip going around that 'a significant Kerry player' wouldn't be togging out. When he saw Seán O'Shea walking around in his tracksuit during the warm-up, the low sludge of unease he'd been feeling for much of the week started to properly crystallise.
'We're in a bit of bother here,' he told his friend, who did what all right-thinking friends would have done and dismissed him immediately. Life is far too short to be listening to Kerrymen poor-mouthing in the 15 minutes before a championship match, especially if you're from a county that has beaten them just once in the past 70 years.
'After about 10 minutes,' Ó Cinnéide says, 'my mate from Simonstown turned to me and said, 'F**k it, I should have listened to you and put a few bob on this, we'd have paid for the weekend'.
'You could see from the start that Kerry weren't working hard enough. They weren't earning the right to play the ball around. They were trying to flick the ball up to themselves on a wet day and all this carry-on. If I'm a Meath player on the pitch at that moment, I'm going, 'These lads aren't great, are they?''
READ MORE
They certainly weren't last Saturday
. The one upside for the Kerry players who got rinsed by Meath in Tullamore is that the game wasn't televised in full anywhere. However bad Kerry people imagine it might have been, it was worse when you watched it back.
The ease with which Meath stretched away in the 15 minutes before half-time was pretty astonishing to watch. It would be one thing if Meath had come up with a flurry of intricate set plays to bamboozle them but the reality was far more prosaic. They routed Shane Ryan's kick-outs, annihilated Kerry on breaking ball. Rudimentary stuff.
With 20 minutes gone, Kerry led 0-7 to 0-5. Between there and half-time, Ryan had 10 kick-outs. He went long seven times and Kerry lost every one of them. On two of the three occasions he went short, Kerry turned the ball over almost immediately. Nine of those 10 Kerry kick-outs ended in a Meath player taking a shot at the posts, leading to eight points.
Meath's dominance of the Kerry kick-out was so total that when the 10th one finally bought Kerry some breathing space – Joe O'Connor won a brave free that Mike Breen immediately moved on to Dylan Geaney – it led to their first possession in the Meath half of the pitch in 13 minutes of football. Even if there's an element of potluck at the kick-out under the new rules, a team that allows itself to get penned in for 13 minutes is miles off being a contender.
'There were probably a few doubts about where we were at anyway,' says Darran O'Sullivan. 'I've been in games like that where you really don't perform. You don't turn up and you find out the hard way that if you're not committed, which is the only word I can say really, you're going to get found out.
'They were missing a lot of big players, which isn't an excuse. But if you look at who they are – Paudie [Clifford] and Seánie for example – footballers though they are, they love the rough stuff as well. They're not going to back down from any fella. They're not going to shy away from any physicality.
Paudie Clifford of Kerry against Cork. Photograph: Bryan Keane/Inpho
'We all know we have great footballers. But you've to be more than that. You have to have the bit of nastiness to you. You have to have the willingness to get hit and give a few hits and get dirty.'
And so, in a week like this, the walls come tumbling down all around the county. The sun is out, the schools are finishing up, the tourists are landing daily. A summer heatwave in Kerry is one of the great Irish birthrights and if you get to combine it with the county team hitting a rocky patch, you get the full Kingdom experience.
Nobody expects Kerry to lose to
Cavan
this Saturday but if they have to play
Armagh
in a quarter-final next weekend, it's perfectly feasible that could be that. All of which means that in every corner of the county, it's the first topic of conversation this week.
'Players are pretty much insulated from it,' says Ó Cinnéide. 'But I nearly think they should be exposed to it a bit. We had no social media in our time so we were able to get into and do our stuff and not worry about the noise. Even though players now take steps to do the same, it has to be almost impossible for some of it not to seep through. And maybe that's no bad thing.
'We can't have it both ways in Kerry. We can't have documentaries on the TV at the moment and fellas going on about the history of Kerry football being such-and-such and what it all means. Well, if it does mean so much more down here, let's see it. Let's see it in Killarney on Saturday.
'I'm getting sick of this #WeAreKerry stuff. What does it actually mean any more? There's a reason we won all the All-Irelands we won – it's because there's an anger there. It's because there's hurt there when you lose. It's because the prestige of the tribe is damaged by a defeat and because it pisses you off on a Monday morning if you've lost on the weekend.
'And that's just me, an ex-player and supporter. I stayed above in Tullamore on Saturday night and drank porter and was just fed up and in bad form after it. I'm just wondering does it hurt any more? I'm sure the players are hurting. I'm sure they are.'
Amid all the noise, it should be pointed out that Kerry are still bookies' favourites for the
All-Ireland
, alongside Armagh. One defeat won't define their summer and if all it takes is an attitude adjustment, that's an achievable target in a short space of time. Particularly if they can get some of their more high-profile injured players back on the pitch by next weekend.
But even if they can, Armagh loom on the horizon with
the memory of last year's All-Ireland semi-final fresh in the minds of everyone
. Kerry were outstayed as much as they were outplayed in that game – O'Shea, David Clifford and Jason Foley all limped away from shots in extra-time before having to stretch out their calf muscles to get rid of cramp.
Down in the tunnel under the Hogan Stand that Saturday night, Stefan Campbell was entirely up front about how certain Armagh were of their advantage. 'The big thing we took away with us at full-time of normal time was the amount of Kerry players that were obviously hurting and cramping,' he said. 'I think we won that psychological battle coming out for extra-time. We made the point inside – we've been there before and Kerry haven't. They probably weren't as battle-hardened as we were.'
Dara Ó Cinnéide playing for Kerry in 2000. Photograph: Tom Honan/Inpho
Kerry have had to dig deeper this year than was the case in 2024 – their average margin of victory for the five games before they met Armagh last summer was over 10 points. This time around,
Cork have run them to extra-time
and they've lost to Meath. Cavan are being dismissed by everybody but they finished level on points with both those teams in Division Two this year. They will at least believe they can give Kerry a rattle.
But there's a sweet spot between being battle-hardened and battle-weary. If Kerry get past Cavan and find themselves landing into Croke Park next weekend having had to rush the likes of Clifford, O'Shea, Paul Geaney and Diarmuid O'Connor back from injury, what kind of shape can they expect to be in? They couldn't last the pace against Armagh with everyone fully-fit and available. What chance would they have as a weakened version of that side in 2025?
'I do think Kerry will be a different proposition against Cavan,' says O'Sullivan. 'I think Paudie will be back, Seánie will be back, I think Paul will be back. I think they'll be more than strong enough for Cavan. But it's a case then of how strong will lads be for Armagh. Because that's what the real test will be.'
Can they turn it around? Yes, obviously. This is Kerry, when all comes to all. They've won All-Irelands from stickier spots than this.
In 2009,
Sligo missed a penalty three minutes from time
that would have put them out of the championship. A week later,
they were level with Antrim with 10 minutes to go
and just about got out the gap. On the bus home that day, the blood got up as soon as word came through that they had drawn the Dubs in the quarter-final and it turned their whole season around.
'Anger can be a very powerful force,' says Ó Cinnéide. 'And you can't manufacture it. It's either there or it's not. A lot depends now on who's back and how they come back.
'The attitude needs to be so much better. Just get nasty, like. I was always criticised for being a nice footballer but there were times when you had to get nasty and you wouldn't be found wanting. That's what people need to see.
'Go back to Tullamore in '09 against Antrim. There was a genuine rallying that day from the Kerry supporters. I was in the stands that day and you could feel it, as if people were saying, 'Jesus, this team might be dying but we're going to support them'. And they did.
'Kerry supporters can be very good like that but the players need to feel that this weekend. They need to feel the anger but also feel the support. Last Saturday, all they heard when they came out on to the pitch was polite support. It wasn't good enough.'
Things need to change, quickly, on and off the pitch. Otherwise, they could be knocked out of the championship in June for the first time since 1994. What will they talk about then?
Nobody in Kerry wants to spend the rest of the summer finding out.
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