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Irish Daily Mirror
2 days ago
- Sport
- Irish Daily Mirror
Opinion: The best Kerry performance since Mick O'Dwyer's team were in their pomp
The predictions came true. Clifford couldn't be stopped. He dictated the terms and conditions. Except no one bothered to read the small print. For this wasn't David Clifford's final - although with 0-9 to his name he hardly had an off-day. Instead the 2025 All-Ireland will be remembered for Paudie rather than David - the guy, who in familial terms, is more Noel than Liam, Jackie than Bobby, Robert than JFK. Read more: Jack O'Connor hints at Kerry 'last hurrah' after landing fifth All-Ireland title Read more: All-Ireland final TV viewers have same complaint during Kerry v Donegal While you could easily make the argument that he is the second best footballer in Ireland, you could never pretend he is the most talented player in his own home. Until today when he got 76 possessions, four points, the keys to the Kingdom and the walk up the steps of the Hogan Stand as the man of the match. As he made his way along the oak panelled walkway, the President watched on. Next to him, the Taoiseach… Ireland's two most powerful men straining their necks to be photographed next to Ireland's most talented brothers. Like schoolchildren. Excited. In awe. And why not? They had watched Gaelic football at its best, Kerry's most complete performance of the century, a combination of the Cliffords' sorcery, Dylan Geaney's understated excellence, Gavin White's surges. Jack O'Connor came up with the plan, Joe O'Connor executed it. They were flawless. Ahead after 20 seconds, they started fast and kept motoring; two points clear after five minutes, four ahead after seven, six points in front after 10, nine to the good after 17. Twice Donegal launched comebacks, getting four points in a row in the first half, dominating for 15 minutes in the second period when they outscored Kerry by 0-8 to 0-3. But by the time the clock ticked past the hour mark, the most tactically sophisticated team in Ireland were reduced to a clueless, panicky mess, taking potshots from silly angles, coughing up possession repeatedly, out Ulster-ed by the county who supposedly had an allergy to sides from Up North. Not this time. The bottom line is Kerry did what they wanted. There was a bit of puke football when they had to win breaking balls. And there was the traditional, classy, fast-flowing passing game which has been coached from one generation to the next. They scored 1-26 - the highest total in an All-Ireland final. Only 0-3 came from frees. On their own kick-outs, they were smart, running Michael Murphy ragged; pushing O'Connor wide to have an actionable Plan B. Everything they tried came off, David Clifford waiting eight minutes and forty seven seconds for his first touch of the ball, then scoring a two-pointer from that possession. Yet while he was exceptional, his brother was better, both playmaker and scorer, quarterback and wide receiver, operating the match off a personalised remote control. And as all this drama unfolded, Jim McGuinness, the most celebrated tactician in Gaelic football, watched from the sideline. Unable to believe his eyes. One of his star players, Ryan McHugh, lasted only 40 minutes. His supersub, Paddy McBrearty, failed to fire or indeed score. His go-to man-marker, Brendan McCole, was outclassed. His goalkeeper's kick-out strategy got decoded. Nothing went right. Kerry's Joe O'Connor celebrates scoring a goal (Image: Mandatory Credit ©INPHO/Ryan Byrne) Yet while he clearly lost the tactical battle and can deservedly be criticised for failing to police Paudie Clifford, there are times when a coach is powerless. And this was one of those days, like Alex Ferguson against Barcelona in 2009 and 2011, Angelo Dundee watching Joe Frazier against Ali in 1971, Davy Fitzgerald's Waterford against Brian Cody's Kilkenny in 2008. 'This is a day to talk about Kerry and how well they played,' said McGuinness afterwards. What else could he say? That they had no Plan B. That his players were not good enough. That the vast majority of pundits tipping Kerry was an additional motivation for the victors. The truth is it didn't matter what plan McGuinness had. Kerry were as close to perfect as a team can get. They made an exceptional side and a deeply intelligent manager look ordinary. You have to remember what McGuinness was up against, a superb team, a once-in-a-generation footballer, his stellar brother, and an underrated coach. Jack O'Connor's All-Ireland final record now stands at five wins, three defeats. Only two men, Mick O'Dwyer and Jim Gavin, have won more championships. And yet he has never been feted like either of those two hall of farmers. Perhaps now that will change because this was as good a tactical masterclass as the one McGuinness produced in 2014 against Dublin. For starters, there was the way he manipulated the new rules to position Paudie Clifford just inside the Donegal half where the three forwards were unable to touch him, yet far enough away from the arc, a border their defenders were anxious to defend. They failed to do so, coughing up five two-pointers, all the while leaving Paudie free to direct the play whichever way he wanted. Seventy-six possessions, each of them shrewdly used, hurt Donegal so deeply. Never mind the four points he scored, there were the points he created, the pressure points he exerted. And watching over him was a man whose first All-Ireland final took place 21 years ago and who has been in six since. We can't underestimate the value of that experience, especially when you add in the three underage All-Irelands he won with Kerry's minor and Under 21 sides. This, he hinted, would be his last hurrah - the end of one era just as another era of Kerry dominance looks set to begin. The Dubs did six in a row. Kerry, in the next five years, could go close to matching that. They were that good.
Irish Examiner
2 days ago
- Sport
- Irish Examiner
David Clifford: 'You have to go out and prove that they are wrong'
David Clifford savoured the feeling of securing the 2025 All-Ireland SFC title with Kerry and lifting Sam Maguire alongside his son, Ógie, and brother Paudie on the steps of the Hogan Stand. The wrongs of 2023 and 2024 have been righted and the doubters have been proven wrong, after delivering their best performance of the season. It's his second All-Ireland triumph. Jack O'Connor's fifth as manager, perhaps his sweetest of all. "We won the All-Ireland in 2022 with a lot of that team, and you can fall into the trap thinking that it's going to happen every year," Clifford said post-match on RTÉ. "Personally, dealing with the disappointment of 2023, and then obviously, last year losing out to Armagh so, we put a massive emphasis on getting back here this year. "Without ever mentioning the All-Ireland, though, one performance at a time is what we said, we tried to stick to it, and we had to re-evaluate after the Meath game, but we'd be massively proud of how we came back after that Meath game, to be honest. His older brother Paudie had mentioned post-match that Kerry had been disrespected by the "one-man-team" talkin 2025. It's a sentiment shared by David. "Absolutely, look, I don't think anyone goes out to read articles, but they get to you, to be honest. You get sent something or someone mentions something to you. No one likes it, but it's no good either feeling sorry for yourself, 'oh why are they saying that about us?'. You have to go out and prove that they are wrong. "As good as our last two performances were, if we didn't get over the line today it would have been all for nothing, so we're just delighted we did." Asked whether it was his side's best performance of the year, Clifford referenced their ability to navigate a crucial period in the second-half. "I suppose so. You'd be very proud, I think they got it back to four and put a really big press on our kick-out, and I just remember Paudie getting a point, Gavin White won a break and slipped it to Paudie and he was away. They're huge scores. "They just give the rest of the team such a lift, so today was probably the best performance, thankfully."
RTÉ News
4 days ago
- Sport
- RTÉ News
Nomadic guru Cian O'Neill seeks to add to trophy haul
Half a minute before the hooter sounded in their quarter-final victory over Armagh, the Kerry players and management had time to indulge in a premature celebration. David Clifford played an unremarkable 10 yard foot-pass back to Brian Ó Beaglaíoch near the Hogan Stand sideline and both players, along with members of the management team spontaneously turned to the Kerry crowd and started fist-pumping, triggering an elongated roar which swept around the stadium. The fact that it occurred after such a routine passage of play was, of course, what was so striking about it. The moment encapsulated the snarling defiance that Kerry brought to the game, having endured scathing commentary for the previous fortnight. Kerry have become very used to playing under the dead weight of expectancy. Only rarely are they afforded the opportunity to trade on 'ye wrote us off' spite, though they tend to flourish in such circumstances. There was a sense that the PR drive to appeal for the Kerry support to rally to them following the Meath debacle had paid off. One man who was conspicuously pumped up on the sideline was Cian O'Neill, who roared and punched the air with gusto as he saluted the Kerry fans in the lower Hogan. Back in the 1990s, Mick O'Dwyer landed in Kildare, a footballing backwater in the preceding couple of decades, to instruct them in the ways of winning football. At the end of last year, Jack O'Connor, after a disappointing end to 2024, turned to a Kildare man in O'Neill, prising him out of Galway to replace the departing Paddy Tally. O'Neill is almost as familiar with All-Ireland finals as the county with whom he's working. This will be his third All-Ireland decider in four years and his ninth in total. As it happens, he's only been on the winning side twice - in 2010, during his stint as S&C coach with the Tipperary hurlers and in 2014, when he was part of Eamonn Fitzmaurice's management team when Kerry turned over Donegal in the forerunner of this weekend's final. He's been around many of the glamour roles, almost like a Carlo Ancelotti of Gaelic Games without the celebratory cigars. Scanning his CV brings up constant reminders that 'oh yeah, he was there that year...' A former Moorefield player, O'Neill spent seven years as a physical education lecturer in UL. His first inter-county role was as a coach of the Limerick footballers' under Mickey Ned O'Sullivan, during which they were promoted to Division 1 of the Allianz Football League, albeit under the old 1A and 1B structure when there were 16 teams in the top tier. Crossing codes, he earned rave reviews as coach of Newtownshandrum in 2009, when they won the Munster club title, the last Cork side to do so until Sarsfields in the most recent campaign. "The difference (trainers) Cian O'Neill and Willie McCormack have made is unbelievable – even just having a fresh voice," Jerry O'Connor told the Examiner at the time. "There's a bit of bluffing going on around the place in clubs over teams who mightn't have a great idea of what they're doing, but with these lads everything is done for a reason. "If the lads say we'll be training for an hour and a half we'll be there for an hour and a half. It's top class." By that stage, O'Neill had been head-hunted by Liam Sheedy as Tipperary set about chasing down Kilkenny. He was their forward-thinking S&C coach during the 2008-11 years when they first took Brian Cody's team to the brink in '09, before crying halt on the five-in-a-row push the following year. It was a mark of O'Neill's standing within the squad that when Sheedy and Eamon O'Shea abruptly departed after the 2010 win, the players prevailed upon their Kildare-born coach to remain on, which he did for one more season. His one-year stint in Mayo in 2012 was successful but rather arduous given the uneven quality of the road from Limerick at the time. It was around then, he underwent spinal fusion surgery after being involved in a car crash a couple of years earlier. Nonetheless, he was again an influential voice as Mayo reached their first All-Ireland final in six years and a first for many of that generation. "He was one of the leading lights in terms of starting my career," Lee Keegan told RTÉ Sport this week. "He has a sharp eye for detail and he knows how to work with the players he has. He'll adapt gameplans to suit his players. For instance, he knew I was an attacking wing-back so he adapted our gameplan to exploit that and bring it out. "He was brilliant. It's no coincidence that everywhere he goes, he does well. Even in Kildare to a degree. They beat us to get to the Super 8s that year (2018)." His sole stint as an inter-county numero uno was in his native Kildare, the period for which many casual supporters will most remember him. Specifically, one campaign. Before that, he had three notably happy years as a coach in Kerry, where the travel was much less taxing and which brought another All-Ireland title. He later told the Irish Times he only left because Kildare came calling. His first season in 2016 was nondescript, though he later said he fell into a bout of depression after the Leinster semi-final loss to Westmeath. His second brought promotion to Division 1 and a Leinster final appearance and a nine-point defeat to Dublin, which was - strange to say - considered to be a proper moral victory in those days. The season which would go down as his most memorable and successful was the one which started out as the grimmest. The Leinster first round loss to Carlow was regarded as a humiliation of Pak Doo-Ik proportions and there were calls for O'Neill to go mid-season. They gradually righted the ship down the qualifiers by the time they were drawn out first to play to Mayo in the last-12. Cue one of the most famous stand-offs of the decade, as the GAA sought to stage it at Croke Park. O'Neill and Kildare refused to back down, going on the Six One and coining the phrase 'Newbridge or Nowhere', giving rise to the mural which adorns the gable wall near the ground. His defiance caught the mood of the time, an era in which Leinster counties were chafing under Dublin's oppressive dominance and aggrieved they couldn't get any serious provincial games outside HQ. Croke Park backed off eventually and Kildare, stirred up, beat Mayo in what is one of their most memorable championship wins since the 2000 Leinster final. The 2019 campaign was a comedown and O'Neill left Kildare, swearing that was that. He was appointed head of PE at CIT, now renamed Munster Technological University (MTU). Then Ronan McCarthy roped him into the Cork set-up for a couple of seasons, with much of his work done over Zoom as the pandemic descended. He was still there to help plot Cork's sensational upset of Kerry in the driving rain of Páirc Úí Chaoimh, aka, the Mark Keane game. His three seasons at Galway, which again saw him traverse the country, solidified his status as one of the game's most sought after coaching gurus. Two All-Ireland finals in three years in a county which hadn't reached the showpiece game in just over decades. At Kildare, the great Dublin team had been their white whale. With Galway, he played his part in bringing down the curtain on their era, with several of the 2010s greats departing after that loss. Pádraic Joyce was certainly miffed to lose O'Neill in the aftermath of the All-Ireland, with the coach returning to Kerry, where he had enjoyed his most concentrated period of success. Again, he confronts the brooding presence of Jim McGuinness on the same sideline. Eleven years ago, Fitzmaurice, O'Neill and co oversaw a gameplan which confounded their revolutionary opponent. Under different conditions, can he and O'Connor do the same this weekend?
Irish Independent
6 days ago
- Sport
- Irish Independent
Watch: All-Ireland SFC final preview – Kerry and Donegal final clash is one for the ages
Can Jim McGuinness get revenge on the Kingdom after their 2014 All-Ireland final loss? Can they Donegal stop David Clifford and do they have a trick up their sleeves? Can the prodigal son Michael Murphy lift Tír Chonaill up the steps of the Hogan Stand once more time? Jack v Jim, Clifford v Murphy – all the match-ups are analysed by our GAA experts.
Irish Times
22-07-2025
- Sport
- Irish Times
All-Ireland number four is Noel McGrath's sweetest yet, but he may already be plotting the drive for five
Noel McGrath is in the lobby of Malahide's Grand Hotel, patiently posing for photographs and cheerfully signing autographs. The Irish Sea just beyond the double doors is hidden beneath a low grey haze while incessant summer rain continues to soak the shoreline. It has been a dark, heavy morning across much of the country but there is a lightness to the air inside the hotel foyer. McGrath was a kid of just 19 when he won his first All-Ireland senior hurling title in 2010. On Sunday, at 34 years young, he collected his fourth Celtic Cross for Tipperary . Walking up the steps of the Hogan Stand to raise the Liam MacCarthy Cup , he brought his two-year-old son Sam with him to the plinth. READ MORE 'To be able to have my son there yesterday was probably one of the greatest things I could have done. I lifted the Liam MacCarthy with him in my arms,' says McGrath with a smile. 'I never thought in my wildest dreams that I'd be able to bring him to Croke Park [while I'm still playing], so to win an All-Ireland with him is unreal. 'That will be something I will remember forever. In time, I suppose he'll see all the pictures from it. He won't remember it but he'll have those pictures. It's special for me to be able to do that with him.' There is a second child on the way in October. Life is about to get even busier, even better. As he speaks, several of McGrath's team-mates are meandering through the lobby, floating around with expressions of total satisfaction painted across their faces. Tipperary manager Liam Cahill has taken Liam MacCarthy and a group of players to Children's Health Ireland (formerly Crumlin Children's Hospital) while others are standing around in small clusters trying to organise taxis to deliver them to one of the city's early houses. Ronan Maher with Tipperary supporter Oisín Crowe during the All-Ireland champions' visit to Children's Health Ireland at Crumlin. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho Conor Stakelum is one of those ambling around the place. This is his first experience of winning an All-Ireland SHC. 'It's the stuff of dreams really,' he says. 'I was on my phone looking at the messages, soaking it in, then I came down to the lobby here and you see everybody smiling. 'You'd always be watching the news after All-Ireland finals, dreaming about being there some day and seeing the buzz around the day after. Now you're in it.' Dillon Quirke is never far from the thoughts of this Tipperary group. Nearly three years have passed since he collapsed during a club match and was pronounced dead in hospital. For Stakelum, Sunday brought back memories of the 2018 All-Ireland under-21 final between Tipp and Cork. [ Ashamed to be seen in public just one year ago, Tipperary's redemption story defies belief Opens in new window ] 'A couple of us were out with Dan and Hazel Quirke (Dillon's parents) on Friday before training, we had a cup of tea and a scone,' says Stakelum. 'Dillon was playing that day [in 2018] and we were just chatting about that match. When we were on the bus yesterday it started to rain, and it was raining that day too. 'If things were different Dillon would be here today and no better man to enjoy it with us if he was here.' McGrath will turn 35 in December. His story of resilience and defiance has already guaranteed him a place in the pantheon of Tipp greats. In 2015 he was diagnosed with testicular cancer and just days later he underwent surgery. But he hasn't let it define him, having now added three further All-Ireland titles. He also claimed this latest one alongside his brothers, John and Brian. 'As I said after the semi-final, it never gets old,' he says of playing for Tipperary. 'As long as you're able to do it and to have days like this, it would keep anyone in good form and looking to do it again. It's great, it's unreal, it's unbelievable.' Tipperary's Conor Stakelum celebrates beating Cork in Sunday's All-Ireland final. Photograph: Morgan Treacy/Inpho The retirement question has dangled overhead for a few seasons but the blue and gold has, for now, always enticed him back. 'There's no point in saying over the last number of years that you don't think about it,' says the Loughmore-Castleiney man. 'When you're feeling good about it and when you're enjoying it, it's hard to step away, because when you're gone, you're gone. You're not going to come back at my age. 'Who knows about the future? There's no point in me saying here now what I know I'm going to do. I'd love to stay playing forever but I know that can't happen.' The temptation might be to sign off on his Tipperary career with that final act of striking over the last point of an All-Ireland final victory. It would be quite the way to go. But the lure of a possible fifth medal is real. 'I'd love to be able to give it a go and have a rattle off it next year again, but we'll go back to the club over the next few months and we'll battle it out against each other there and see what happens.' Outside, the rain continues to fall but nothing can dampen the mood of contentment swirling through the hotel. Just over McGrath's shoulder, outside the double doors, is the team bus. It'll be off to Tipperary soon. Taking Liam MacCarthy home. For the fourth time and counting, Noel McGrath will be along for the ride.
