Two days after this year’s All-Ireland U21 football final in May, David Kelly went looking for Donegal’s Michael Murphy. The two lived in the same apartment block on campus in Dublin City University (DCU) and Kelly sought out Murphy with the empathy of a psychoanalyst keen to assist a distressed patient.
Murphy had missed an injury time penalty in Donegal’s narrow defeat to Dublin. If he needed help to deal with the trauma of the experience, Kelly certainly was the best available therapist for Kelly had already suffered a similar wound which enabled him to recognise Murphy’s scar.
With four minutes remaining in last year’s championship, he had stood over a penalty for Sligo against Kerry in the Round 3 qualifier in Tralee. A goal would surely have given them victory and provided one of the biggest shocks in championship history. Kelly shot high and his effort was stopped by Diarmuid Murphy. It was probably the signature moment in last year’s football summer.
“I had taken a few penalties in the league and had scored them all and I was fully confident going up to it,” says Kelly. “There was a bit of a delay before it was taken but I didn’t over-think it or anything — I just wanted to take it and score it. I struck it well enough but I wanted to keep it down and I lifted it.”
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Standing on the cusp of near-immortality, and failing to grasp it, Kelly almost became more noted for what he didn’t achieve rather than for what he could have. That was inevitably going to leave some psychological baggage but recovering from the disappointment gradually became hard-wired into his mentality; the wound soon healed and the scar was barely visible. He says: “Of course it was hugely disappointing but I’ve long moved on and I don’t think about it anymore. Some people might still be wary of mentioning it around me but I do laugh about it really.”
This season was all about moving on and moving up, both for Kelly and Sligo. The history of the championship is littered with teams who went close to scaling the mountain before collapsing in a heap afterwards. Sligo hit that slope twice in the last decade. After nearly reaching an All-Ireland semi-final in 2002, they bombed the following season; after winning a Connacht title in 2007, they were relegated to Division Four of the league in 2008 and ended up in the Tommy Murphy Cup.
At the outset of this season, Sligo drew up their goals: to get 10 points in the league and to become a serious team. Both targets were intertwined but reaching their first goal secured a successive promotion and league title. The nature of their championship win against Mayo was a confirmation of how faithful Sligo have remained to their overall objective.
“I think this team is a lot better team than the one which won the Connacht title in 2007,” says Kelly. “I think we could have been one or two players short that time and I don’t know if I was even up to it myself at that stage. But last year gave us a lot of belief and we had no doubt that we could win against Mayo if we performed. We have shown in the last two years that if we put in a good performance, we’re capable of beating anyone.”
Kelly kicked three excellent points from play against Mayo and Martin McHugh said on radio that Kelly had now become “one of the top ten footballers in the country”. McHugh went even further than just offering that exalted assessment. He also said that Kelly was now in a class “not far off Colm Cooper.”
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Kelly hasn’t enjoyed the same profile as some of his peers but he certainly shares a stage now with many of the game’s best finishers. As a corner-forward he is probably more comparable to Meath’s Bernard Flynn than any other player of the last two decades — game, brave, unselfish, with lethal pace and a real eye for a score. That’s a serious arsenal in the modern game.
He has taken out some big names. Against Kerry last year, Marc Ó Sé was substituted at half-time. “He [Ó Sé] is an absolute class player and he’s used to taking lads to the cleaners,” says Kelly. “So you do take a lot of confidence from playing well on these guys. You look back and think, ‘If I can get on well against him, I can get on well against a lot of defenders’.”
Most teams chain their best man-marker to Kelly but Sligo’s progress over the last two seasons has given him more freedom to express his talents. He no longer carries the greater weight of the scoring burden because Sligo have developed one of the best scoring spreads in the country. In their eight league games this spring, they had seven scorers on three occasions and eight scorers in two games. In the league final against Antrim, 17 of their 19 points were from play, with 10 originating from the full-forward line. Stephen Coen came off the bench in that game and kicked three points from play in 15 minutes, while Adrian Marren was their top scorer last year and he also can’t get near the team now.
“When we won Connacht in 2007, we relied on one or two scorers the whole time but this year the six forwards are scoring in most games,” says Kelly. “We’ve a lot more options and we’re much harder to defend against. We’re improving all the time as a team. Even if I’m singled out for extra attention, it makes no real difference now because there are five other forwards that are well able to score. Teams can’t really afford to do that to us anymore.”
Kevin Walsh has been the guiding hand on the tiller but Kelly finds inspiration all around the ship now. Paul Taylor and Dessie Sloyan, two of Sligo’s best forwards of the last 15 years, are part of the backroom team now and Kelly has offered himself as a vessel to be filled with their knowledge. They all have. “It’s only in the last two seasons that I’ve realised how much I’ve picked up off all the lads,” he says. “Timing my runs, decision- making, shot selection — anything to help improve my game.
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“Everyone has pushed themselves up another notch in training and lads are doing more work on their own. No-one is resting on their laurels because they know they won’t be playing if they’re not putting it in. We have a professional set-up and you really feel that the backroom team are doing so much for you that you have to do everything for them. There is unbelievable belief there now but I think we all realised after last year’s league that we could really go places if everyone gave everything.”
They will find out against Galway today how far they have come but Kelly was always going places. He was still in secondary school in St Attracta’s in Tubbercurry when he was called up to the Sligo panel in 2006. He didn’t take long to leave his calling card, the winning goal against Westmeath in his first league game. “When I got the letter to join the Sligo panel, I was the happiest man alive,” he says. “But I didn’t actually tell anyone because I didn’t really want to brag about it. It was only about a month afterwards when everyone else found out because I was in training. I just love it and I still regard it as a massive honour to be playing for Sligo.”
They buzz is good and the living is easy now. In February, Kelly won a Sigerson medal with DCU, while he finished his final exams in May after completing a four-year degree in sports science and health. He plans to return to college in September to begin a masters and his time now is filled with travelling to primary schools around the county and promoting the GAA summer camps which he will begin working on next month.
Since they beat Mayo, Kelly has listened to the county buzz with talk of Sunday. Kids flock around him for his autograph, people approach him in the streets to check on his fitness and talk about the match. Kelly hasn’t cocooned himself from the swarm of interest and the swell of expectation. Everything is linked to football and the expanding horizon of possibility; embracing it is what he’s made for.
“It’s all football, football, football, but I just love it,” he says. “I spend so much time playing football that people sometimes ask me if I hate going training. But I don’t know what I’d do without it. Every evening I’m training or doing something. Even after the summer when the club is finished, I’d take the week off and then I’d be mad for the road again. I’m just one of those people who doesn’t like to take time off. I wouldn’t be able to stay still.”
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Next ball. Next game. Next challenge. Getting over last year’s disappointment was never going to take that long for Kelly. The wound has long healed. The scar is no longer visible.
The challenge facing Kelly and Sligo
* To win this year’s Connacht title, Sligo will have to try and achieve something the county hasn’t managed in the last 80 years: beat three of the strongest teams in the province in succession
* When Sligo won their Connacht title in 1975, they defeated London, Galway and Mayo
* When they won the provincial crown in 2007, they beat New York, Roscommon and Galway
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* In the last 20 years, nine teams have managed to win Connacht titles after winning three games (outside playing either London or New York)
* Galway managed it in 1995, 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2008. Mayo did it in 1992 and 1997, while Leitrim won their Connacht title in 1994 after defeating Roscommon, Galway and Mayo
* If Sligo manage to win a Connacht title this year defeating Mayo, Galway and Roscommon, it could be their sweetest yet