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Irish Times
6 hours ago
- Sport
- Irish Times
Donegal v Kerry: Throw-in time, TV details and team news about All-Ireland football final
When and where? Donegal will play Kerry in the 2025 All-Ireland senior football championship final at Croke Park. Throw-in is on Sunday at 3.30pm. Where can I watch? You can watch the final on RTÉ One, coverage starts at 2.15pm. Alternatively, the game is also on BBC Two, where coverage starts at 3pm. You can also follow the action on our live blog on The Irish Times Sport website . Paths to the final Donegal become the first team to play 11 championship matches in one season, their single defeat coming to Tyrone in a group stage game. Ulster Championship: READ MORE Donegal 1-25 Derry 1-25 Monaghan 0-21 Donegal 0-23 Donegal 1-19 Down 0-16 Donegal 2-23 Armagh 0-28 All-Ireland Series: Donegal 0-20 Tyrone 2-17 Cavan 1-13 Donegal 3-26 Donegal 0-19 Mayo 1-15 Donegal 2-22 Louth 0-12 Donegal 1-26 Monaghan 1-20 Donegal 3-26 Meath 0-15 Kerry, meanwhile, will be playing their ninth game in the final, also losing a group game, to Meath. Six of their eight victories have been by eight or more points. Munster Championship: Cork 1-25 Kerry 3-21 Kerry 4-20 Clare 0-21 All-Ireland Series: Kerry 3-18 Roscommon 0-17 Cork 0-20 Kerry 1-28 Meath 1-22 Kerry 0-16 Kerry 3-20 Cavan 1-17 Kerry 0-32 Armagh 1-21 Kerry 1-20 Tyrone 0-17 What are the bookies saying? Kerry are just about favourites with the bookies, 8-11 to evens, maybe favouring their experience in finals and/or the fact they have David Clifford . Can Jim McGuinness and Michael Murphy pull another out of the bag? Donegal manager Jim McGuinness celebrates with Michael Murphy after the final whistle. Photograph: Ben Brady/Inpho Donegal have only been in three finals in their history and Jim McGuinness was heavily involved in them all. Playing in 1992, they beat Dublin in the final. Twenty years later, McGuinness led Donegal to the Sam Maguire again as manager, and again two years later in a final they lost to Kerry. A fourth All-Ireland final beckons and they look as strong as they've looked since McGuinness was last at the helm. After losing in the semi-finals last year, legendary forward Michael Murphy came out of retirement after dabbling in punditry at GAAGo and with a column in this newspaper. Murphy, at almost 36 years old, has been a talismanic figure in bringing his county back to the final, as top scorer for Donegal and winning lots of aerial duels and physical battles. But the star of McGuinness's show is undoubtedly the collective, as well as their fitness and conditioning, where the tireless half backs and forwards like Ryan McHugh, Péadar Mogan and Ciarán Moore have had big seasons. Donegal defend in numbers and then counter up the pitch with intensity, and few have been able to live with them at full throttle, as Meath found in the semi-final. Can Donegal stop David Clifford? Kerry's David Clifford. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho What constitutes stopping David Clifford for Donegal? The Kerry forward is one of the best to ever grace the game and in seemingly unstoppable form. A masterful performance by Mick Fitzsimons for Dublin limited Clifford to only two points from play in the 2023 final, but even stopping Clifford to four or five from play or keeping him out of the goals could be considered a great effort. Clifford has scored four goals and 23 points in his last three games. If Donegal focus too many resources on stopping Clifford then his brother Paudie and Seán O'Shea can wreak havoc. The new rules focusing on attacking football have been a boost for Kerry, with the best forwards in Ireland, and it gives them the best chance of winning the Sam Maguire. Team news The teams will be updated here when they are made available. Diarmuid O'Connor participated in the full Kerry training session on Saturday, increasing hopes that the midfielder will make his return from a shoulder injury. Paul Geaney also took part after a shoulder injury, with Tom O'Sullivan still not fully back after a calf injury. Can I buy tickets? All-Ireland final tickets do not go on public sale, they go straight to the clubs. So it may be a case of knowing the right person, the amount going to each club at the discretion of the county boards of the competing counties. Raffling tickets is a common way to win them, so maybe have your fingers crossed for your lucky number to be called out.
The 42
4 days ago
- Sport
- The 42
Unified green and gold axis seems off colour to a Kerryman in pre All-Ireland final Donegal
THE GREATEST FEAR your offspring could visit on you? The standard one is that some day in the distant future, they will push a glossy brochure into your hand advertising the comforts of the Mystic Rose Nursing Home, before loading you into a car to see those facilities up close and personal. Well, that used to be it up until last weekend, when it was brutally displaced by a new reality we really did not see coming. Flushed of face and hoarse of voice after a day well spent in Dublin's Big House, the first born comes bursting through the door in the wee hours not just hollering joy, but without taking breath trash talking David Clifford with the kind of venomous intent that would not just have left Ricey McMenamin blushing but desperate to bathe in holy water to cleanse. David Clifford: Undue trash talking. Ryan Byrne / INPHO Ryan Byrne / INPHO / INPHO We never thought it would end like this. Donegal was sold to us on a glossy brochure, too, entitled Home from Home. It informed us that the distance between the deep south and the far north west was immaterial. Landscape and not kilometres shape people. Kerry and Donegal was the same patch of ground which just happened to be separated at birth, small farmers land, big hills, sea views, turf, emigration, green and gold football, only the lingo separated us. Take away their 'aye' and our 'yerrah' and we were one and kind of the same. Advertisement Never be fooled by that sales pitch, because whatever little cracks do exist become chasms when exposed to the red hot heat levels an All-Ireland final generates. Of course, we have been here before in 2014, but it was different back then because things were more malleable and manageable. We found a perfect compromise, they would be dressed in the Donegal uniform for the first half, Kerry's for the second. It was the perfect nod to both identities, but came with the considerable bonus of a happy ending to ensure that there would be no legacy of mental scarring. No maybe about it; it was our finest parenting hour. And in those pre All-Ireland final weeks when Donegal were not involved, they would be dressed in the other shade of green and gold while parading around the Diamond in Donegal Town to a hummed Artane Boy's tune. It was a trick picked up from the odd summer when Cork holiday makers, in the event of beating Kerry, would dress their children from head to toe in red and white at 10am Mass, before marching them up the aisle twice for Holy Communion, just to be sure, to be sure. Beyond the homestead, though, the reality of being different tribes in similar colours manifested in ways that we simply could not comprehend. They would spend their whole summers locked literally – these were pre flowing football FRC times – in a wrestle to the death inside Ulster, but when they were banished from the stage, they invested their goodwill without any hint of betrayal or shame fully behind whatever Ulster team was still left standing, despite having weeks earlier been their sworn enemies. Offer them a choice of an angry red hand that may well have slapped them into submission or a friendly green and gold one, and guess which one they would clasp? It boggled the mind because we came from a place where the only support ever extended to Cork was limited only in the event of them ever following through on their promise to seek a referendum to declare an Independent People's Republic, in which instance we were committed to hitting the paving stones to canvas for it. We tried to reason with them. We peddled the line that together as a unified green and gold axis, we would all be better served. We could help Donegal exploit their huge tourism potential by showing them the knack of greasing a coach driver's hand, we could share our resources and corner the bagged turf export market to China and, together in football, we could be a superpower. Sure, haven't we 40 All-Irelands between us . . . But they were not for listening. Instead they trusted in God or Jim – it was always hard to tell the difference – and in the return of a man who might as well be the son of God in Michael Murphy and they would keep their faith. Acts of faith: Jim McGuinness and Michael Murphy. Ben Brady / INPHO Ben Brady / INPHO / INPHO And that is why we are where we are, isolated and peering out the window fearing a changed future and regretting the not too distant past. There is a little oasis in the South Donegal village of Laghey which we frequent regularly and in the immediate aftermath of that 2014 final, the host insisted that we should visit so his locals could get it all out of the way and imbibe in peace. We took him up on the offer, offering words of consolation which we fear may have been interpreted differently. We feel there is a reckoning coming and it may well be that we will not be calling to Laghey again until such time as the Seven Arches is repurposed into a health and well being centre. We could stay at home, but those comforts are sparse in nature now that it has become a base for the Tir Conaill Ultras. The only comfort now may well be that brochure to a place where the misery will be nursed.
Irish Times
14-07-2025
- Sport
- Irish Times
The Weekend That Was: A Kerry v Donegal All-Ireland final isn't the clash of styles you think it is
Styles make fights. The All-Ireland final looks like it will be billed as the best kind of showdown, a good old-fashioned ding-dong between two teams who favour different methods of skinning the cat. In the green and gold corner we have Kerry , keepers of the kicking flame, salty purveyors of it's-called-football-for-a-reason asides. And in the, eh, yellow and green corner we have Donegal , who would handpass their granny's coffin into the grave if they thought they could get it past the priest. That's presumably how it will be built up, at any rate. Watch out for a couple of weeks of very broad-brush painting of these two teams. It will be David Clifford v Michael Murphy ; Jack O'Connor v Jim McGuinness ; Shane Ryan v Shaun Patton. The smooth, slick footballing brilliance of princes of the Kingdom versus the systematic, relentless drive of the boys from the Hills. Some of it will ring true. But some of it will be the worst sort of guff too. The trick will be to separate the myths from the reality. READ MORE We have plenty to go on at least. Kerry and Donegal have played 18 matches between them in this year's championship to date so the sample size is bigger than it's ever been for a final. When these teams met in the 2014 decider, they had played a total of nine games between them to get there. There will be no secrets between them come 3.30 on Sunday week. The rest of us looking in from the outside will have no excuses for being ill-informed either. There are some obvious contrasts to be drawn. For one thing, Donegal tend to have a greater spread of scorers than Kerry. They saw a dozen players get on the scoresheet on Sunday, compared to seven for Kerry on Saturday. Ryan McHugh of Donegal in action against Meath's Jordan Morris during the All-Ireland SFC semi-final at Croke Park. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho Kerry have averaged a shade under eight scorers per game in their eight matches, Donegal have averaged almost exactly 10 per game in their 10. As Ciarán Kirk showed in these pages last week, Kerry rely heavily on David Clifford and Seán O'Shea for over half of their scores. Donegal are a more varied threat. [ David Clifford and Seán O'Shea carrying big scoring burden for Kerry Opens in new window ] And there's no doubting the essential truth that the two counties think about the game in contrasting ways. McGuinness has often referenced the fact that Donegal teams have traditionally leant on a running, handpassing game because they play so many matches in the wind up in the northwest. Whether this rings particularly true is debatable – they get plenty of wind around the Ring of Kerry too. But one way or another, it's in the county DNA and McGuinness has never been of a mind to change it. Donegal's game is about high-running, fast breaks, up and down the pitch. That's who they are. Kerry do it differently – but as McGuinness pointed out yesterday, not THAT differently when it comes right down to it. 'I suppose when you're playing a running game and a support game, everybody needs to be able to do that,' he said, referencing the spread of scorers. 'I think today everybody did do that and we were able then to rotate fellas inside and give them a breather and let other fellas go back and hopefully they're going to be able to defend to the same level and attack to the same level as well. 'Listen, the game has changed dramatically over the last number of months. We just felt that it was important to see how those changes would grow, if you like, and then bring our own template to how we want to play the game to that. And it's served us well. I think Kerry have done the exact same thing. 'I don't think Kerry have done a huge amount differently. They have their own way of playing as well. They play with their head up, they're looking for dink balls, they're looking for third-man runners, they're looking to support. In the same way we support off the shoulder, they're looking to do it the exact same way, only with a different kick or whatever it is beforehand. 'So, yeah, everybody's got their own principles and how they see the game. For me it's important just to keep what it is to be from your county very close to the centre, and then move with the rules. And I think we've done quite a good job on that front.' Kerry's Kieran Donaghy celebrates scoring a goal with James O'Donoghue during the 2014 All-Ireland final against Donegal. Photograph: Morgan Treacy/Inpho Though it may be a slightly self-serving point to make, McGuinness isn't entirely wrong. Kerry do like to let the ball do the work, it's true. But the basic thrust of both teams' game is the same – organised zonal defence, a manic zeal for breaking ball around the middle, get it up to the forwards. Kerry are not dogmatic about kicking at all costs. They indulge in plenty of handpassing too – and you can be sure they'll do so in the final. Kerry football is about winning, first and foremost. Never forget that. Go back to their last great coup, the 2014 final against Donegal. It was billed as a clash of styles all the way from the semi-finals onwards but Eamonn Fitzmaurice was adamant behind the scenes that Kerry weren't going to fall into Donegal's trap. Instead, they mimicked Donegal's low block and waited for a mistake, Kieran Donaghy pouncing on a botched kick-out for the killer goal. So yes, styles make fights. And in the new game, there isn't room for an old-style Donegal to sit back and turn a final into trench warfare. But this is Jack O'Connor's eighth final. As he pointed out on Saturday night, it's a fourth final for most of his Kerry team – or indeed a fifth, including the replay in 2019. They won't be taking any more chances with the ball than they need to. One thing feels pretty obvious after the weekend – the two best teams are in the final. Can't ask for much more than that from a championship.
Irish Times
14-07-2025
- Sport
- Irish Times
Green and gold summer as Kerry and Donegal set up football decider
We have ourselves a green and golden All-Ireland football final, Kerry and Donegal booking their slots in Sunday week's decider after seeing off Tyrone and Meath at the weekend. Two 'underwhelming' semi-finals they were too, as Seán Moran puts it in his report on Donegal's 20-point triumph , Kerry made to work harder by Tyrone, but, writes Gordon Manning, steered home by David Clifford who was in 'gluttonous form' . A year ago, Michael Murphy was working as a TV pundit, having hung up his boots. Then he decided to come back 'to help in every way possible that I could.' His part in reviving Donegal has, says Malachy Clerkin, been 'immense'. As, of course, has that of Jim McGuinness, Gordon hearing from the manager and Paddy McBrearty after the game. And Seán got the thoughts of a highly delighted Kerry manager Jack O'Connor , who's now through to his seventh – seventh! – final. Just as chuffed were the footballers of Kildare , Paul Keane reporting on their victory over Limerick in the Tailteann Cup final. The focus now shifts back to hurling ahead of next Sunday's final, Denis Walsh looking at the history of the Cork v Tipperary rivalry . 'On the stairway to eternity, Cork and Tipp matches were forever jostling for favour.' READ MORE Gerry Thornley brings us the latest from the Lions tour, Hugo Keenan finally making his debut in the 48-0 win over an AUNZ Invitational XV . ' Getting off the jacks was an issue ,' he revealed when asked about the bug that laid him low. He was flushed with success, though, Johnny Watterson rewarding him handsomely in his player ratings , although no one scored higher than Mack Hansen, 'star quality shining' from the fella . Andy Farrell is now left to ponder his selection for the first Test , Gerry reckoning that at least five starting positions remain up for debate. Australia, you'd imagine, will prove to be trickier opponents for the Lions than Portugal proved to be for Ireland. John O'Sullivan was at the Estádio Nacional do Jamor to witness that 'grizzly' 106-7 non-contest – perhaps fortunately for Portugal, he discovered that there was scant interest from the Lisbon locals in the game. In golf, Philip Reid reports on Rory McIlroy's tied-for-second finish at the Scottish Open , his thoughts now turned to this week's Open at Royal Portrush. That's where Shane Lowry's focus is too as he attempts to replicate his 2019 success in the tournament. Leona Maguire, meanwhile, will have a 'pep in her step' ahead of next month's Women's Open after she tied for seventh at the Evian Championship on Sunday. There were first-time winners in both the men's and women's singles at Wimbledon at the weekend, Jannik Sinner coming from a set down to beat Carlos Alcaraz, Iga Świątek crushing Amanda Anisimova 6-0 6-0. And in New York, Keith Duggan saw Katie Taylor 'close the books on her riveting series of fights against Amanda Serrano', the Bray woman triumphing against the Puerto Rican once again at Madison Square Garden. TV Watch: It's the final day of the third test between England and India at Lord's – England need six wickets and India need 135 runs to go 2-1 up in the series (Sky Sports Cricket from 10.15am). It's stage 10 of the Tour de France (TG4, TNT Sports 1 and ITV4, from noon) and at 5pm you can see Ireland take on Scotland at the World Rugby Under-20 Championship (RugbyPass TV).
Irish Daily Mirror
14-07-2025
- Sport
- Irish Daily Mirror
David Clifford 'the greatest to have come out of Kerry' says Tomás O'Sé
Kerry legend Tomás Ó'Sé believes David Clifford stands alone as the best player to ever come out of the county. Clifford was once again immense at Croke Park this past Saturday, scoring 1-9 in a magnificent display as Kerry breezed past Tyrone to reach the All-Ireland final. The Fossa man has been far and away the best player in the country for years now, and with the introduction of the new rules this year, he has thrived and now exerts even more influence over games. His performances since bursting onto the scene have been out of this world with many feeling the full-forward is perhaps the best to ever grace the game. Multiple time All-Ireland winner Ó'Sé didn't go quite that far on The Sunday Game last night, but he still paid Clifford perhaps the highest compliment one Kerry footballer can give another. "Everybody in Kerry would always hate discussions about who is the greatest? Who is the best? Because you have the likes of Micky Sheehy, Gooch, Matt O'Connor, Peter Canavan, but I think he has done stuff that elevates him, in my opinion, I think he is the greatest to come out of Kerry," said Ó'Sé. "I just think the way he carries himself, the way he leads, what he does off the ball, what he does off the field, he's old-style, he's grounded and his family make sure he's grounded. "But it's what he does on the field and the consistency he brings. A poor season for David Clifford is a top season for other players. "He is gifted and no matter what way you want to throw it at him, he'll take abuse. He has the silky skills but he has a tough edge to him as well. "Everybody outside of Kerry would say 'why don't you build him up? He is the greatest footballer of all time? "They don't like to build him up too much in Kerry because we need him for the next game!" Clifford and Kerry will be favourites for the All-Ireland final when they take on Donegal in two week's time. Jim McGuinness will undoubtedly have a say in things however and one can only imagine what plan he is cooking up to deal with Clifford.
