GAELIC GAMES: ABOUT THE league? Not much ado. No bonfires. No pitch invasions. No tears. No intensity. No controversy. No mourning its passing. Kerry won their 19th title at Croke Park, banishing Derry yesterday in a game so soporific that 10 minutes before the end stewards were asked not to take their end-of-match positions but to wake patrons up and thank them for coming.

Spectators were invited to invade the pitch but declined, stating that such a gesture would have been out of keeping with what had gone before.

Lovers of trivia will recall that in the more appropriately modest confines of Parnell Park it was Derry who had beaten Kerry in last year’s final.

It says much about the competition’s failings that yesterday’s reverse of that result by Kerry wasn’t even accompanied by so much as a hint of real rivalry or score-settling.

Kerry felt it was better to win than to lose, but having lost three big finals last year they would say that.

“Sure, it is as good to get a win anytime you come up here I suppose,” said manager Jack O’Connor, stifling his delirium. “We wanted to finish off with a win so (pause) delighted, yeah.”

Derry manager Damian Cassidy made a philosophical point to a journalist when asked about the nature of the defeat.

“Did you think that was a bad defeat?”

“Are there good defeats?

“I don’t know. There’s different types of defeats. Leagues are not bad defeats. Because our games are about championship football.”

We knew that but we had to be told again really, those of us who gather every year and try to read meaning into the league like teenagers around a ouija board. Kerry, it is said, win the competition more often than anybody else because they take it seriously as a harbinger of championship form.

Yet Kerry used as many players as anybody this winter and there was no hint on O’Connor’s face that he was running home to set up a Bebo site and tell all his friends about yesterday’s achievement.

Kerry win more often than not because, as perennial achievers, they have a good residual fitness in winter and spring and because they have a strong, deep panel.

Yesterday, during the game’s interminable second half, a period of our lives none of us will get back, O’Connor was able to throw on Darragh Ó Sé, Tadhg Kennelly and David Moran. Has any county ever had so much pedigree just sitting on a bench waiting to be chucked into a game?

O’Connor noted afterwards that his side had won with something left in the tank.

Cassidy pretty much implied that his team had lost with something left in there too.

Fact was, Kerry always looked pretty comfortable even if they played a staccato style and only gave hints of what they are capable of.

Their win had some moral weight in that they provided the game’s only goal and with it one of the best pieces of play. It was fitting as such that three points was the difference between the sides at the end.

Donnacha Walsh, who had started for Kerry at wing forward in place of the luckless Paul Galvin (whose groin strain failed a fitness test), came like an express train to accept a fine pass from big Mike Quirke nine minutes into the game. Quirke, who has forsaken an international basketball career for a place on Kerry’s fringes, gave a glimpse of what he might be capable of, taking a fine ball and laying it into Walsh’s path for the younger man to come and place it in the corner.

You wouldn’t be able to tell by the siesta-type atmosphere in three-quarters-empty Croke Park, but there was nothing really between the sides until the last quarter when Bryan Sheehan arrived in and started kicking frees and the Kerry attack got a little interested in the possibility of carving out one more beautiful score.

Seán Bán O’Sullivan had a fisted effort come back off the post. Gooch Cooper, if pressed on another day, would probably have made more of the rebound. Instead he slotted an easy point.

Other than that the main point of interest was the sight of Kieran Donaghy wandering out to the wings and delivering to Tommy Walsh precisely the sort of long, raking diagonal balls which he himself was nourished on a few years ago. Walsh, after a hesitant start, was a constant thorn in the sides of the Derry men.

Derry won’t really give the game a second thought, but if they were inclined to look for a moment when it went away from them, it would be the semi-tragic, semi-comical incident on 22 minutes when brothers Eoin and Paddy Bradley ran into each other two-thirds of the way through the first half.

Paddy hit the deck like a sack of spuds falling off a lorry and had to be replaced (albeit he returned later) suffering from concussion.

His absence offered Croke Park its first serious look at James Kielt, the coming star of Derry football, but Kielt was adequate without dazzling and the game missed the potential for mischief which two livewire Bradley brothers had been offering.

From then on a Kerry win seemed inevitable.

“We hung in there,” said O’Connor. “I don’t think we played exceptionally well, but any time Derry came back into it we pulled away.”

That about summed it up without any journalistic palaver.

Bring on the summer.

Please.