Just too easy
Kieran Donaghy shrugs off the attentions of Michael Shields to get a shot on goal during yesterday's All Ireland final
THE season closes with some dreary scuffling under wintry skies and a whistle that hits the bloodstream like a sedative.
There is no beginning or end to the narrative of Kerry excellence. They just come to these days like salmon drawn back to the spawning ground and do their business. Some days obdurate as a black ocean, others glowing like a perfect, gaping sky. Always immense and powerful.
They won their 35th All-Ireland crown yesterday and it was easy. Kerry don't traditionally need hand-outs, but Cork chose to give them two beauties here. It was like finding a burglar in your house and helping him bring the boxes down the stairs.
It was slapstick stuff. Kieran Donaghy got two goals that Douglas Bader could have finished. And they put a distance between the teams that was probably artificial.
No matter. Kerry-Cork managed to half-empty the stands long before Declan O'Sullivan got hold of the canister. It degenerated into a tired, doomed squabble. Just one neighbour haggling with another over that great oak depriving their garden of light. An old, repetitive story.
All day, the game had an incestuous feel, a sinful intimacy.
It wasn't just some old July ritual transported to September, it was one man's lonely obsession trundled out for dissection under klieg lights.
Billy Morgan's fingerprints smudge every page of contentment in Cork's football history since around the time Edison got an electric bulb to work.
Yet, mostly, it's been an unrequited love.
Other than down the craggy coast-line of the west, Cork people see Billy as a wild-eyed eccentric, peddling trinkets to the gentry. Hurling is the Rebels' passion. Gaelic? It brings to mind Bill Shankly's observation that if Everton were playing at the bottom of his garden, he'd pull the blinds.
All his life, Billy has fought that kind of condescension, the smirky tone of sympathy for a fool's devotion. And, all his life, he has defied the odds and the demographics.
True, there are more sharp edges to his personality than you'd get in a pipe-bomb. Actually, you think of the questioning now commonplace for Steve Staunton and Eddie O'Sullivan and you try -- in vain -- to imagine Billy politely fielding the same sarcasm.
It wouldn't happen for much the same reason a gas leak wouldn't be investigated with a kerosene lamp.
Passion
Kerry have been the bane of Morgan's life, but they've also been the pilot light for his passion. You can't live next-door to the opera and not acquire an ear for beautiful things.
Yesterday, he sank into Pat O'Shea's embrace like a man thieved of his trademark anger. His dignity reflected the cleanliness of the murder. You don't lose an All-Ireland final by 10 points and rail against the little things.
Cork, effectively, imploded. Their six selected forwards reaped a total of 0-2 from play, half of them replaced with 25 minutes still to run. Their midfield was over-run. Yet, it was the full-back line that took a comedic turn.
'Gooch', inevitably, was the problem.
He still looks like a kid with a cap-gun, but he is gifted with un-natural balance and unfeasible courage. To begin with yesterday, Kieran O'Connor was his marker. He might as well have been trying to rope a seagull. In the 17th minute, Seamus Scanlon lumped a plain ball towards the Cork 'square' and Cooper followed its flight-path, O'Connor giving chase. As Alan Quirke came barreling out to clear the precinct, O'Connor ducked as if he could hear the whine of an approaching shell.
Gooch? He heard nothing. Just kept his eye on the ball and beat Quirke to the touch for a wonderful goal. Three minutes later, he lost O'Connor again and blazed over.
It was enough. Billy dispatched Graham Canty to Gooch's station, directing Michael Shields towards Kieran Donaghy and O'Connor towards Bryan Sheehan. In other words, he took the nuclear option.
Removing Canty from the mouth of the Cork 'square' was a bit like unlocking your front door.
So, though they got to the mid-point just that single goal adrift, Cork no longer had the defensive shape they coveted. The change amounted to an invitation for Kerry. An invitation to go targeting Donaghy.
And everything just fell apart inside 28 seconds. Resuming with the sun in their eyes, Cork chose to necklace a few passes deep in their own half when an ignorant hoof might have been the judicious root. You could almost see the accident brewing.
Suddenly, Ger Spillane had his pocket picked by Donaghy and the big man found himself 10 yards out from a literally empty goal, Quirke -- too -- having become entangled in the mad safari.
Six to the good now, Kerry quickly iced the cake, adding on four unanswered points, each one the product of spilt Cork possession. Billy, arms folded, felt a cold breeze in the rib-cage.
There was almost half an hour remaining, but Kerry were already home.
As Morgan put it later: "The real disappointment is in losing by ten points. Because, I don't think we're ten points worse than Kerry. Having said that, they're a very good team and I have no complaints.
Disastrous
"That second goal was disastrous. I mean, we had only left in one goal all year and that was in the Munster final. At half-time, we really believed that we could do it. But what happened happened.
Trouble is, Kerry don't do sabbaticals. They are pitiless. This was their fourth time in four Championships to play Cork in Croke Park and they've won all four, the average margin a debilitating eleven points.
Kerry's third goal, in the 48th minute, hinted at the difference. A daft collision between Quirke and Shields, the ball spilling at Donaghy's feet, like a wind-tossed bank note. Momentarily, he looked startled. Truth was, he had enough time to be transmogrified.
Donaghy goaled and Billy, hands on hips, betrayed nothing from within. But he must have felt like he'd just lost his house to a kid's prank that happened to go wrong.
When Cork did summon the illusion of a kick with Daniel Goulding's 53rd minute goal, a little schemozzle soon ensued that brought a stoppage of two minutes. It ended with bookings for Paul Galvin, Derek Kavanagh and Daragh O'Se. And Kerry's momentum restored.
That's the essence of them. They can be beautiful one minute, hard and cynical the next. They can enchant with one hand, squeeze murderously with the other. Whatever it takes, Kerry are inclined to find it.
This year, they have been goaded by some media commentary that -- probably -- just filled a convenient chamber of the collective mind. Kerry, ordinarily, don't need these things. But they don't look gift horses in the mouth either.
"We wanted to do it for our county. We're very proud of where we come from and we like to show that on the football field," said O'Shea.
It was tantamount to the Pope articulating his devotion to prayer. Some relationships don't need explaining, you see.
Kerry and the canister being one.
