Allianz Football League Division One final: Kerry v Mayo (tomorrow, 4pm, Croke Park, live on TG4)
THEY say the leagues are the crystal ball through which we can see the colour of July’s tickertape, but recent evidence tells us different.
Kerry and Mayo have had a spring of being talked up and the world view on the All-Ireland series will be altered by whatever goes down in Croke Park tomorrow afternoon.
Mostly, though, we learn more from what happens during the league than who actually wins it.
Kerry have won the last two, sharing the 2021 title with Dublin, but neither county reached last year’s All-Ireland final and the Kingdom didn’t make it that length in 2020 either.
On their record-breaking All-Ireland adventures, the Dubs played in six straight league finals from 2013-18, winning five.
What’s telling from that stretch is that none of the teams they played there – Tyrone (2013), Derry (2014), Cork (2015), Kerry (2016 and ’17) or Galway (’18) – reached an All-Ireland final in the same season.
It’s a funny dynamic tomorrow that even despite back-to-back All-Ireland final appearances and that Mayo beat Kerry in the 2019 league final, it still feels like James Horan’s men are the ones coming to Croke Park with something to prove.
Football’s great firefighters are engaged in a strange ongoing battle to convince the world that their new team is real.
They went off for a while after 2017 and regathered themselves, finding their way back through the likes of Oisin Mullin, Padraig O’Hora, Mattie Ruane, Ryan O’Donoghue and Tommy Conroy.
They’ve coped with the losses of Conroy and Cillian O’Connor this season and still finished second to the Kingdom in the table. But until the day comes that they get their hands on Sam Maguire, they’ll remain in the eyeline of the sceptic as well as the romantic.
You can say they don’t have the forwards to win an All-Ireland and their scoring returns this year prior to last weekend’s win over Kildare would back you up.
Whereas Kerry are running at around 55 per cent of their scores from open play, the best in Division One, Mayo were the worst team in the league in that respect, sitting at just above the quarter-mark (27 per cent).
But when they sensed blood last weekend, they went to town. Jason Doherty, 0-5. Ryan O’Donoghue, 1-2. Jack Carney, 0-3. Jordan Flynn, 1-2 from midfield. All of that from play.
They’ve have never had the forwards to blitz you but they’ve always had the forwards to compete, and nothing about that will change in the foreseeable.
Their chances of silverware tomorrow rely on how well their backs can do to allow their forwards to have an impact.
If anything sums up their abilities to dig deep, Oisin Mullin struggled on David Clifford down in Killarney and Padraig O’Hora had bother with Tony Brosnan too, yet Kerry still had to dig it out by a single point.
Sean O’Shea has been missing since being pulled from the team that night with what Jack O’Connor said at the time was “a dislocated big toe or something”, and while Jack Savage has covered rightly, the best number 11 in the game would be missed by any team.
O’Shea, Dara Moynihan, Gavin White, David Moran, there’s still a bit of stuff looking to fight their way back into Kerry’s team ahead of championship.
But with no serious test coming in Munster and the All-Ireland quarter-finals not for another 12 weeks, they’ll go at this absolutely full tilt.
Be it through Pairc Úi Rinn or nowhere, their handy run to a provincial championship will do them no favours in the onset of the first truly split season.
Without the old April break where counties would often engage in a second pre-season, Kerry are the one side in Ireland who’ll feel physiologically and psychologically stuck in that mould of having to peak twice – once in March and once in late-June. The rest can just keep on trucking.
This is the first test of how Kerry’s new balance, with all its clean sheets, shapes up in Croke Park. Mayo should, arguably, be more comfortable in their surroundings.
We’ll learn a bit about the two teams tactically and we’ll learn a bit that might inform individual jobs in the summer. Kerry’s goal threat might get them through but on that front you’ll want to see how well Mayo shut it down.
Whatever we do learn tomorrow, what we won’t learn is who’s going to win the All-Ireland.
