Mayo’s speed from deep could be a major problem for Kerry unless they get their tactics right

It was actually only a few days prior to that final management informed me I’d be squaring off against the Gooch.

And that was all they told me.

Not how to mark him, what tactics to employ or even what constituted an acceptable score to keep him to. Just that, as of that moment, he was my problem.

But vitally, he was my only problem.

All the other problems were for the rest of the lads.

I had to do what I had to do. Nothing else. And I could do it whatever way I wanted.

Free rein. Blank canvas. Complete trust.

That’s what really inspires a player – or should do anyway: responsibility.

So I dived in. Analysed the clips. I watched his movement. Noted the zones he stood in. The way he kicked. Who he tended to pass to.

All very impressive.

That year, Gooch played on the points of a diamond. At different stages, he’d occupy the zone in front of the goals, then the spot at the ‘D’, and occasionally, he’d take up these half spaces between the 21-metre and 45-metre lines on either wing.

His kicking was so good, so dextrous off either foot, he could bring you anywhere inside the scoring zone and inflict pain in a way that was so stylish, you’d nearly applaud him as he did it.

Hmmmm. What to do?

By that stage, Gooch had been playing for Kerry for 14 years. He’d been a marked man for all of them.

By my reckoning, he’d heard every shade of insult, taken all manner of sly belts, that there wasn’t much that could put him off anymore.

If you stood off him, he’d kill you with a pass. If you engaged, he’d glide past you.

Really and truly, if he got the ball in his hands at all, you were in trouble.

In the end, the plan conceived was based around one simple principle: geography.

We were going to play as much of the game as possible in a place where he couldn’t hurt us.

To achieve this, first I had to find a way to bring him there.

Not necessarily by attacking. But, in as much as possible, drag him into a section of the pitch where he wouldn’t even want the ball, for all the good he’d do with it.

Knowing the likelihood was that Kerry had their own plan for that, counter manoeuvres were devised.

Early on in the game, I noticed they had a man assigned to track runners from our defence.

So I’d wait until one of our wing-backs went and then go with him, leaving Gooch with no choice but to follow.

You tend to get a sense of what’s working and what isn’t early on in matches and a couple of times that day I heard Gooch shout for someone to take me, only for him to end up doing it himself.

Then, once I had him deep in his own half, I was like a boxer draining the life force out of an opponent by wrapping them up and leaning on them on the ropes.

As he tried to get back up the pitch, I’d run across him, pull him back, stop him moving, sap his energy. Try all I could to break his spirit.

When you expend energy tracking back and constantly trying to untangle yourself from someone bigger than you, it’s basically impossible to keep any for the things you need, in Gooch’s case scoring and creating.

Genuinely, I’d no notion that I’d score myself that day or stop him from doing the same. They were just by-products of the plan.

Now, if you’re really lucky, there are a small number of days when all your stars align and everything that you plan for and hope happens in a game does.

That afternoon, there was a moment. The screen in Croke Park flashed up a shot of four of the Kerry management team and the mixture of frustration and confusion they wore told me that this was our day.

Even now, full-backs who attack pose awkward and fairly new questions for management teams and their defensive systems.

The current Kerry backroom will have spent more time devising plans to clip the wings of Mayo’s flyers than anything else over the past two weeks.

Lee Keegan, Oisín Mullin, Eoghan McLaughlin and Paddy Durcan can all shift. Enda Hession has the look of a fella who can move too.

Mullin and McLaughlin are obscenely quick. Keegan and Durcan have exceptional end product.

Along with their aggressive, high press, that’s where Mayo get the majority of their energy and their most important scores from.

Dealing with just one strong runner can be tricky. The threat of four or even five of them is a nightmare.

Basically, you have three options.

1) You employ the ‘attack is the best form of defence’ tactic. You mind the ball. Don’t turn it over. You transition fast. You’re clinical up front. You fatigue their defenders. You sap their energy. Now, they’re running in quicksand.

2) You track the runners. Each of the forwards tags their own markers. All of them. They block their runs. Pull and drag. They knock them off course before they get far enough to do any damage.

Or:

3) You sit. You drop back. You form a defensive shape. You eliminate the threat of their pace by ensuring that no matter how fast they move, they’re still running into tacklers.

So what do Kerry do?

Option 1 is the brave way to go, but not a situation you can be sure is going to come to fruition. You might go out with that intention. But if it doesn’t work out, you have to fall back on one of the other two.

Option 2, to me, isn’t plausible for Kerry. I can’t see David Clifford and Seán O’Shea and Paul Geaney and the rest tagging and blocking all day. It’s just not something they do.

So that leaves us with Option 3, the fall-back scenario.

It’s by far the most logical. For that reason, we should expect protracted periods of the game tomorrow when Kerry defend with 13 or 14 players in their own half.

Because if we accept that Mayo’s greatest threat comes from their pacey defenders, then at least four of the Kerry forwards are going to have to defend in some way or other.

For those guys, taking up a ‘zone’ is far less gruelling work than chasing backwards. So that’s what they’ll do. They’ll congregate en masse in their own half.

The Limerick hurlers spring to mind here. Remember last year’s All-Ireland final? When Cork’s pace was supposedly the secret to cracking the Limerick’s defence?

Turns out, pace is only useful when you’re running away from defenders. It’s not much good when you’re accelerating directly into them and there’s no space in behind. Because Kerry know already that Mayo will need a couple of goals to win this. That pound for pound, the Kerry attack is considerably better than Mayo’s.

If they don’t play it smart, if they allow Mayo’s defenders to run all over them in Croke Park tomorrow, Kerry will have nobody to blame but themselves.