Allianz Football League Division One: Kerry v Donegal (Saturday, 2.30pm, Killarney, no live TV coverage)
AGAINST the backdrop of a ferocious debate over the rules of Gaelic football, Kerry visited Ballybofey in early May 1981.
It was the first time a team from the Kingdom had played in Donegal for 25 years.
Six days later, a Special Congress voted to ban the handpassed goal and tightened up on handpassing as a whole.
The more things change, eh?
In 1981, Donegal were not on Kerry’s radar.
That was evident from the deference shown by the weekend’s hosts.
At the beginning of that year, Kerry had concocted plans to go on a tour of Australia. A holiday.
The best part of the plan was the ultimate act of cute-hoorism: they would get everyone else to pay for it.
So in one weekend in early May, they did a tour of the north. On Friday night they played Monaghan in Castleblayney, then Antrim on the Saturday and Donegal on the Sunday.
One of the big draws in Donegal was that the Kerry team were due at a dance in Jackson’s Hotel on the Saturday night.
But after pummelling Antrim, they were advised not to drive across the north in the dark and bedded down around Glenravel, sending the county chairman and secretary off with their apologies.
Donegal chairman Micheal Mac Giolla Easpaig told the assembled crowd that “no team deserved [a holidy] better than the present [Kerry] team, who had given so much enjoyment and had done so much for football.”
Kerry’s fundraising activities were so successful that their trip turned from three weeks to five. They spent three weeks in Australia, a week in Hawaii and a week between San Francisco and New York. Everything was paid for and the players were given £1,400 each in pocket money.
Donegal were only too delighted to host the All-Ireland champions.
Kerry were happier still to dish out another hammering – scoring three goals in the first 15 minutes and hitting 6-10 in total – before heading back south with their coffers nicely filled.
It is the kind of bowing at the altar that Ulster teams would shed over the next three decades.
Imagine how Kerry coming north now for an exhibition with their cap in their hand to pay for a five-week holiday would be perceived now. Not in a million years.
Everything has changed. Over the last 15 years, Donegal have grown to the point where Kerry dislike them almost as much as they do Tyrone.
It grew out of the 2012 All-Ireland quarter-final defeat, after which the legendary Weeshie Fogarty wrote a double-edged Kerry’s Eye column entitled ‘Yes we do have a problem with Ulster teams’.
Harking back to the Down team of the ‘60s and their new tactic of breaking kickouts, the theme of the Kingdom’s struggles against northern opposition had only bypassed that spell in the ‘80s when they were, as Pat Spillane put it, seen as the Manchester United of the sport.
Outside of the greatness of the ‘70s and ‘80s, Kerry have continued to wrestle not just with Ulster teams but what those teams have done to their own conscience.
Kerry mirrored them to win the All-Ireland in a dour dogfight in 2014.
A bit over a year later, they met in a bad-tempered league game in Killarney.
Donegal’s Leo McLoone and Kerry’s Alan Fitzgerald were sent off. There were two black cards, a clatter of yellows and a subsequent one-match ban for Neil McGee for bending back Fitzgerald’s fingers, leading to his retaliatory strike and a red card.
McGee, now part of the backroom team, later said it was the thing he most regretted doing on a football pitch.
Both counties were also fined €5,000.
The mercury hasn’t risen to that temperature since but beneath the surface, there crackles a clash of tradition against trend.
The storm-enforced postponement of this game two weeks ago aroused suspicion, not just in Kerry.
Jack O’Connor couldn’t help but drop a tongue-in-cheek barb after his side’s win in Celtic Park last weekend.
“Yeah, Donegal will be a tough assignment next week. I think the whole country knows they have a lot of training done. Probably a good bit more than us. So… I’m trying to be as diplomatic as I can there.”
When they met in ‘81, the handpass was in the firing line.
In 2012, Liam O’Neill had just set up a football review committee headed by Eugene McGee with the brief of producing a white paper on the ills of Gaelic football.
The latest iteration put their paper into practice.
This game will be keenly viewed by the coaching community, although not on TV as, having been initially on TG4′s schedule two weeks ago, their decision to replace it with Down-Roscommon means their quota cannot cater for the refixture.
It’s easy to label it a contrast of styles. The numbers from round one back that up.
In their win over Dublin, Donegal made 281 handpasses and 24 kick-passes in open play, at a ratio of about 12:1.
Kerry’s 199 handpasses to 47 kick passes comes in at just over 4:1.
So if nothing else, we might learn a bit about the effectiveness of each.
Can Kerry still kick the ball against a team as defensively well-tuned? If they can’t, who can?
A lot of the thinking going forward could lean back on this game.
You’re nobody until Kerry care who you are.
For most of the first 120 years, they hardly knew who Donegal were, let alone cared.
They know now.
Donegal’s days of deference are long dead.
TEAMS
Kerry: Shane Ryan; Damien Burke, Jason Foley, Tom O’Sullivan; Graham O’Sullivan, Tadhg Morley, Sean O’Brien; Diarmuid O’Connor, Barry Dan O’Sullivan; Paudie Clifford, Sean O’Shea, Ruairi Murphy; Conor Geaney, Donal O’Sullivan, Dylan Geaney
Subs: Sean Coffey, Killian Spillane, Cathal Ó Beaglaoich, Cillian Trant, Tom Leo O’Sullivan, Paul Geaney, Keith Evans, Darragh Lyne, Eddie Healy, Mike Breen, Micheál Burns
Donegal: TBC