UNLESS it actually happened, it would have been impossible to imagine a set of circumstances where Kerry scoring seven goals in Croke Park to record their biggest championship win against anyone for 36 years would have been forgotten in the three-week fog of football talk since the All-Ireland quarter-finals.
But then no one could imagined a statement from Cork blaming the referee, weather, match schedule for not beating Kildare, or Tiernan McCann’s ruffled quiff and pratfall against Monaghan causing such outrage and soaking up so much talk time since.
In the meantime Kerry performed their traditional disappearance into the shadows cast over Killarney by the festival in Tralee, closed the gates and set to work unpicking Tyrone. The work of the last three years reshaping their minds and strategies to properly deal with blanket defences and counterattacking teams should stand to them, but every Kerry team with any sense of the history will feel a chill in their bones against a team pieced together by Mickey Harte.
Back when Tyrone consistently felled Kerry on the biggest days in the greatest games of the era, the match-ups on paper usually favoured Kerry. The key was Harte and the hours of work distilled and digested into a simple, effective package of measures of neutralise Kerry. It took a special kind of genius to do that.
Even in defeat by Donegal and others in recent years, Tyrone’s tactical set-up has always troubled better teams for a stretch of every game. They might lack the immortal kind of player that won them three All-Ireland titles to turn that pressure into wins, but they have the capacity to work hard and turn the screw on any team. When Harte looks at Kerry, he will see plenty of ways to break them down into digestible pieces, too. For all that was right and proper about Kerry winning last year’s All-Ireland, it didn’t place them any great distance ahead of everyone else. Eamonn Fitzmaurice has repeatedly pointed out that when Kerry are ordinary, they can be dangerously ordinary.
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They don’t look comfortable when teams run at them. Tyrone’s entire gameplan is built on that ability. Tyrone have rarely matched up pound for pound against Kerry at centrefield, but never gotten destroyed there. If they can hang in again, they will find opportunities to prod Kerry’s soft spots in defence.
Tyrone will target Kerry’s playmakers and runners out of defence — David Moran, Paul Murphy, Killian Young — swamp the space around Colm Cooper and install the required sweepers for James O’Donoghue and Kieran Donaghy. Kerry will place the same attention on Tiernan McCann, Mattie Donnelly and Peter Harte, pick a marker for Sean Cavanagh and vary their points of attack while holding the same shape that clogged up Donegal in last year’s final.
Kerry will hold their shape. Tyrone will sit deep. It all adds up to a stern battle of wills tilting on a few isolated moments — a goal, a miss, a lapse in the defensive lines. Two years ago Tyrone kept Mayo honest in an All-Ireland semi-final without seriously making them sweat. Cementing the remarkable progress of the last month needs them to pressure Kerry more than that. Kerry have shown the bits and pieces of a team ready to win two-in-a-row: the grit and class that beat Cork, the focus to deliver a complete performance even when Kildare were already in the grave.
They’ve also sacrificed everything that comes naturally before to win an All-Ireland. That humility should give Kerry a shot at another.