The Jacks haven’t gone away, you know. Turns out they were just on a sabbatical the last two years, normal service now resumed. And Éamonn Fitzmaurice had a notion this win meant more than most. “All year they played like men with no medals – look at them now, celebrating like it’s their first.”
They were too. You’d swear they’d never bumped in to Sam Maguire before, even James McCarthy, Stephen Cluxton and Mick Fitzsimons wearing the look of rookies who’d just won their first All-Ireland medals.
But 27 between them. Twenty-seven. Nine apiece. Mad.
A most excellent sporting occasion, for which it was even harder to acquire tickets than for a Coldplay concert, the place abuzz on a sunshiney July day. (Jesting).
Seán Moran: League’s championship promise may be clouding but it remains bright at the top
Malachy Clerkin: The GAA should make more of St Patrick’s Day - and more of its intercounty stars
Sports Review 2023: Mary Hannigan picks the best quotes from the sporting year
GAA happy that GAAGo has ‘bedded in well’ as 2024 season launches
“It mightn’t have been the picturesque game everyone wanted,” Fitzsimons told Damian Lawlor come full-time, but he wasn’t apologising, and look-it, nor should he. Dublin and Kerry’s job wasn’t to paint pretty pictures, it was to get the rewards for a season’s grind.
Just the point in it at half-time.
“Cagey,” as Joanne Cantwell put it, a game that was “all over the place,” reckoned Tomás Ó Sé, who spent the first 28 minutes trying to figure out who was marking who, David Clifford’s “blink of genius” when he set up Paul Geaney’s goal, giving the Kingdom the lead come the break.
And it stayed cagey until Paddy Small’s goal, at which point it became lively. “The Hill’s involved now, ‘the Boys in Blue’, and everything else,” said Éamonn, the decibels from the terrace rising having been distinctly muted before.
Tit for tat. “The teams are level – do not go anywhere,” advised Darragh Maloney, but there was no fear of that. Apart from anything, it was lashing outside, so even the dog wasn’t looking for a stroll.
And there were we thinking they’d be needing water breaks to rehydrate themselves under the throbbing July sun. Ho ho.
The game still didn’t reach picturesque levels, but no matter how all the midweek talk about the Kerry v Dublin rivalry being unparalleled might have irked the other 30 counties (plus New York and London), go on, admit it, it’s hard to beat. Intensity is the most unforgivably overused word in sport, but Lord, the intensity.
John Small flattened. “But he wasn’t lying on the ground rolling around, they don’t do theatrics in Ballymun,” said Éamonn, the players too busy trying to eke out a win to be playing dead.
Clifford – David, not Paudie – was hell-bent on proving that he is actually human, his wides greeted with cheers from The Hill like they were a bit stunned themselves to realise he was capable of such missteps. “It just has not been his day – and those words don’t often go together in the same sentence,” said Darragh.
Over on BBC Northern Ireland, they had assembled a group of celebs at Croke Park, namely Patrick Kielty, Paul Mescal, Dara Ó Briain and Adrian Dunbar, to add their insights to the ones offered by Sarah Mulkerrins’s panel which had a bit of an Ulster flavour, it being made of up of Michael Murphy, Mickey Harte and Oisín McConville.
Mescal, a former Kildare minor footballer, reminisced fondly about the time he broke his jaw playing Gaelic football, while Kielty had his own tales to tell about his Down days. Adrian, though, was focused on analysing the match they had just witnessed. “If Clifford had done what Clifford usually does it would have been a different game,” he said, his fellow celebs’ faces reading “Jesus, Mary and Joseph and the wee donkey” on hearing such harsh punditry.
But it was close enough to being echoed back on RTÉ, Tomás gutted for the Clifford brothers after such a tough year on the family front.
But, he said of the result, “you can’t have any complaints.” And Dublin, he said, “will never see the like of them again”, doffing his cap to McCarthy, Cluxton and Fitzsimons.
Outside, Sinéad O’Connor’s voice had filled the air before the game, Christy Dignam’s on full-time. A poignant reminder of the loved ones we’ve lost. And how sport can give you a breather from the crushing sadness of it all.
