Tadhg Kennelly walks into the post-match interview auditorium, shoots a glance at the rising pews in front of him and marvels at the amount of bodies that fill them. "Never knew there were so many newspapers in Ireland," he chuckles.

Clearly Kennelly hasn't spent the summer scanning the bottom shelves for little tit-bits of information about what has been going on in the Kerry circle, for which he left a far better climate and some €300,000 behind in Australia to return to. You know that circle. Where they kill each other at training. Where harmony depends on what part of the county you're from.

Where they thumb their noses to codes of squad discipline. Where they obsess themselves about what their manager really thought of them in his memoirs. Really? Well, if that's the case then it should be a blueprint for the future.

This Kerry team have done what no other Kerry team have managed in their long and proud association with the game over the last 125 years. They've reached a sixth successive All-Ireland final. In an age of qualifiers and the strong awakening in the province of Ulster, that milestone should be acknowledged first and foremost before a thought turns to Cork in three weeks' time.

Think of it. Six finals. Six seasons where training at both ends commences beneath darkening skies. Even the great team that Tadhg's late father, Tim, adorned stopped one short of that. This will be Kennelly's first final but the sense of fulfilment has yet to be reached. Remember Tadhg's mantra when he touched down late last January?

He wasn't just home to play for Kerry, he was home to win an All-Ireland with Kerry. He's smiling though, knowing that such a courageous career-changing decision can still be justified in the most tangible way possible. He's picked a good bunch to make that 12,000-mile leap to. He knows that. They have their little squabbles, their blow-outs, their moods, but they don't lose sight of what they want.

Kerry won as they pleased, putting Meath's arm behind their back in the opening minute of the second-half and not releasing it until they safely escorted them off the premises 36 minutes later.

eyesore

Meath left with little defiance, Cian Ward's late goal causing Jack O'Connor no more consternation than a swift glance at the clock above the scoreboard to know that there was scarcely enough time for Diarmuid Murphy to put boot to leather again. Most of the previous 71 minutes had been an eyesore on a pitch more suited to Torvill and Dean.

Just over 12 months ago when Kerry played Galway, they had the grace of ballet dancers, as they skipped across a surface treated to the worst deluge the capital city had seen in years. Yesterday both sets of players looked like sailors on the high seas struggling to keep their balance. Committing to turn was hazardous.

Whatever tyres the players wore made little difference. Meath got no traction, no momentum whatsoever. They lost Stephen Bray early to a dislocated shoulder and were clinging to Kerry ankles pretty much all the time after that. Their slavish devotion to the long early punt didn't help either. Five of their first-half collection of 10 wides came from passes that simply overshot the runway at the Hill 16 end. Some of their intended deliveries were far too ambitious in the conditions. For Tommy Griffin and Mike McCarthy it was meat and drink.

Yet Meath kept feeding them, kept quenching their thirst. So a game in "the trenches", as O'Connor put it afterwards, developed. Just as Jack imagined would happen. "It didn't look pretty from the sideline but sure there are different types of game," he said.

"We played a league final here back in April. That was a different type of game, there was no intensity, no great cutting in it. High scoring. Today's game was always hard-fought.

"There was a lot of stuff going on out there in the trenches that maybe didn't look pretty but that was the kind of stuff that could well stand to you. It panned out very much the way I thought it would. I thought it was going to be a dogfight. I knew Meath were going to give a good account of themselves. That's the way you want a semi-final, you don't want an open game where there is no physicality." Right now they have just engineered the best possible platform for the next three weeks until the final. The opening 35 minutes of the Dublin game have been pinpricked.

O'Connor even had the temerity to make Cork favourites the next day! Which they are, of course. Kerry were only a little better than they were in July. Colm Cooper was anonymous, Declan O'Sullivan hard-pressed to make a real impact. Their drive came from others areas of the field, through Kennelly, Paul Galvin, McCarthy and Tomas O Se. And off the bench.

Tommy Walsh paid the price for his lack of urgency all season, ruthlessly whipped off in the second quarter for the busier Kennelly the last day out against Dublin. But reprieve came quickly after half-time yesterday.

The physical nature of things was not allied to Donnacha Walsh so he was called ashore for Tommy Walsh. Caoimhin King had only just badly screwed a shot into the Davin End from a good position, when Kennelly was inviting Walsh to time his catch above Anthony Moyles with the perfect delivery and shoot past Paddy O'Rourke for a 2-3 to 0-4 lead.

This was the game's defining period. Moyles has been a stop-gap figure at full-back for Meath and can't have built up much confidence in the rookie goalkeeper behind him all season. Kerry smelled weakness and seized upon it, doing to Meath what Meath had, in turn, done to Mayo three weeks earlier.

Tactics

"It wasn't a day for putting in any special ball like we did against Dublin so we changed our tactics a little," admitted Kennelly. O'Connor had seen the need to do things differently in an edgy opening period. Darran O'Sullivan's penalty for an innocuous Moyles tug of Gooch's shirt three minutes in didn't have the same cataclysmic effect on Meath as Gooch's goal had on Dublin four weeks earlier.

There was no ranting or raving at the interval as Kerry pitched two points clear, just a simple instruction. "We weren't direct enough in the first-half. Tommy's goal kind of reinforced what we were saying at half-time," said O'Connor.

Once Walsh added a point for a six-point cushion, Kerry's grip was not going to loosen and a bad match lost the will to live altogether. Not a score between Ward's sideline conversion on 48 minutes to Kennelly's 64th-minute point sums up the depth of malaise there was. In analysis, Meath are not 'top four' material but they never proclaimed to be. They were pragmatic to the point of talking themselves out of it.

Kerry always looked to be holding something in hand. A lot of other counties would have wished to have prolonged their season as they have done and it didn't run away from them. The test will be to come back and be competitive in their province in 2010, which they haven't been for far too long. For O'Connor there is the beauty of defeat to Cork in June to feed off for the three next weeks.

"They beat us by eight points. That's comprehensive in any man's language," he figured. There is also the notion that a team that has now reached six finals isn't treated with the respect it deserves. "This team has been written off so many times as far back as 2001, including '02, '03, '05, '08. So that's a lot of times to be written off," O'Connor added.

But they're still there, living the dream in September. The journey has little relevance to the destination.