O'Connor delighted with Walsh reaction to being dropped
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TO Gooch or not to Gooch? That was the question buzzing around Croke Park at 3pm yesterday as all speculation centred on whether Kerry's flame-haired N0 13 was fit enough to start.
Kingdom fans looked mightily relieved when he appeared to warm up but by the day's end, it was returned Aussie Rules star Tadhg Kennelly and super-sub Tommy Walsh who were their heroes as Kerry reached their sixth straight All-Ireland final.
"Given the conditions, especially against Meath, we knew it wasn't going to be easy," said Kennelly. "But we felt if we kept going, we had the footballers and the physical players out there to match them and we would break them.
"We were lucky that we got the goal at the start of the second half; we changed up our game-plan and it worked."
Walsh was the man who scored it and manager Jack O'Connor said that last year's Young Player of the Year responded to being dropped exactly as he'd hoped.
"That's the way you want a fella to react when you leave him off. He made a good impact" he said.
And O'Connor couldn't resist a grin when he added: "There's good spirit in our camp despite all the rumours of disunity! Fellas realise that if they have a bad day, they might be let off the next day, but he surely put down a marker for the next day.
"This team has been written off so many times, our last war-cry before leaving the dressing-room was that we'd been written off as far back as 2001. They've been written off many years since, including 2002, 2003, 2005, 2008. That's a lot of times to be written off! But they keep coming back; there's a fierce resilience there."
They'll surely be written off more than ever after yesterday's dire match in which their opponents scored only twice for the regulation 35 minutes of the second-half.
Kerry weren't much better themselves before the break, turning ends with just 1-3 to their credit, the goal a gifted penalty after just three minutes. So what was the half-time message?
"We'd an awful lot of ball but we were going sideways with it, we weren't going direct enough. The word was to try and get ball into the full-forward line quicker and earlier," revealed O'Connor.
"We'd a great start to the second-half with Tommy's goal. That just gave us a bit of a cushion."
O'Connor stressed that the raggedness of the performance did not stem from complacency.
"Maybe the supporters were getting complacent but we didn't feel ourselves that the Dublin game was the real world, especially when we saw the drop of rain falling.
"The rain is always a great leveller. Meath's backs stuck in tight to our forwards and we found it hard to make headway there in the first half.
"We've a lot of work to do and I don't think today would frighten the daylights out of Cork."
Usually mild-mannered Meath manager Eamonn O'Brien bristled slightly when asked why he'd taken off Seamus Kenny in the late stages, and whether he had thought about switching full-back Anthony Moyles, who had to endure a torrid time, at some stage.
"I didn't think it was a penalty at the time," he said of Kerry's early break. "But it's very hard for me to say, I'm a 100 yards away from it. These things can go for you so you take it as it comes.
"We had to claw our way into the game after that and ended up just two points behind at half-time but Kerry were the better team overall.
"We were too predictable in what we were doing; we wanted direct ball but they were dropping their wing-backs deep so we needed to play it through the hands a little more."
Losing their leading attacker and team captain Stephen Bray to an early shoulder injury was a big blow, according to O'Brien, while the Royals' boss also added: "We faced that against Mayo and we dealt with it. I wouldn't say that was the cause of what happened."
