Bank of Ireland All-Ireland Senior Football Championship Final
Kerry 1-20, Mayo 2-9

SCIENCE and sorcery in one afternoon as Gaelic football’s bluebloods left a nation spellbound with a performance so complete, so consummate that the day should have been prefixed with an advisory.

Warning: Jaws may irreversibly drop, eyesight may be irreparably damaged. And, of course, for one corner of the land, hearts may be permanently broken.

Kerry didn’t simply win their 33rd All-Ireland senior football title in Croke Park on Sunday at Mayo’s incalculable cost, they made it their own. In truth, it must go down as one of the poorest contests in years, but the irony is that it threw up one of the finest performances by a team in the big house in just as long.

The science was in the manufacture of a half hour of football so perfect that is could be bottled and sold as an elixir whenever GAA folk go queasy at the presumed death of the beautiful game.

Take two teaspoons of Kerry, First Half All-Ireland Final 2004 and you’re healed.

Of course, for every sugar coated tablet there’s a bitter pill, and the antidote comes in the other bottle, the second half. By half time – even if there were many of the Kingdom faithful nervous as hell to even think so – the match was a done deal, the second 35 minutes a forgettable affair.

Kerry had locked down Mayo in every position, made every inch of the park their own, put the Kingdom’s familiar signature all over the day.

Pat McEnaney might have been generous to a fault in allowing Trevor Mortimer a slight pull on Mike McCarthy’s cloth and Tom O’Sullivan might have been betrayed by the Croke Park sod in the build up to Alan Dillon’s fifth minute goal but beyond a great guttural roar from the Mayo hordes it hardly registered with Jack O’Connor’s players.

Mayo’s goal might have pushed Kerry two points in arrears but the reconstruction of the Kingdom was already well underway.

O’Sullivan, McCarthy and Aidan O’Mahony were an impregnable wall at the back, raking up ball and spitting out Mayo forwards like a merciless combine harvester.

Beyond them the Ó Sé brothers and Eamonn Fitzmaurice just billeted their men – including Mayo’s playmaker Ciaran McDonald – out into acreage where they were rendered largely ineffective.

With their house safely under lock and key then, Kerry went about their invasion of Mayo territory in the most direct and unrelenting manner they have done all year. Sensing a weakness in the Mayo rearguard for aerial dominance the Munster champions sent Johnny Crowley, Dara Ó Cinnéide and Colm Cooper with velcro on their hands and proceeded to rain in the furry ball to their full forwards.

For that opening 35 minutes Crowley – a surprising but totally calculated and justified choice ahead of Mike Frank Russell – was a colossus, fielding and breaking ball, and chasing and tackling like a dervish.

Ó Cinnéide – a doubtful starter right up to lunch time with a troublesome back – complemented Crowley’s industry and added the grace notes with his most flawless display of place kicking all season.

Ah yes, and then there was the sorcery. Just one word for it, well, two actually.

Gooch. Ouch!

If Mayo deserve sympathy – and surely they do – then Dermot Geraghty should get the lot of it. A plucky 20- year old sent out to mark a kid a year older, the Shrule-Glencorrib man might have fancied his chances. With the whiz kid kept scoreless after 17 minutes Geraghty must have been thinking what all the fuss was about.

The Mayo defender hadn’t long to get his answer. A text book move. A short Ó Cinnéide free finds Eoin Brosnan who drops a high ball in to the Mayo square. Crowley collects, lays off to Cooper, point. The Gooch just pulling the wings off the fly.

That score put Kerry 0-8 to 1-2 ahead, Dillon’s goal a fast fading memory but Cooper was just toying. McDonald was Mayo’s string puller, trying hard to make things happen and punctuating a desperate Mayo performance with a couple of sublime scores but the coup de gracecould only be delivered by one man.

At 0-10 to 1-3 adrift there was still hope for the Connacht champions that their day might turn somewhere but in an instant that last glimmer of hope was wrenched from them in a sublime moment.

Eamonn Fitzmaurice sailed a high ball towards Cooper, who had Pat Kelly for company. The Dr Crokes man sprang up like a firework, fielding effortlessly, and was already haring for the Canal End goal as he touched down.

We believe, that for a split second, he countenanced a rudimentary point before banishing such thoughts from his head, side stepping a mesmerised Mayo defender and slipping the ball under Peter Burke as graceful as Maradona in his prime.

Kerry made it to the break 1-12 to 1- 4 to the good, Burke’s having to make a great save in the 33rd minute to deny Crowley a second Kerry goal, but the damage was done.

If there was to be any redemption for John Maughan’s men it had to come swift after the break. Positional and personnel changes were made – Geraghty substituted and presumably ushered away for counseling – but Maughan was as well trying to quench a fire with petrol.

Mayo simply had no answer. Mike McCarthy was seen as often in the Kerry attack as in defence, Tom O’Sullivan was dispensing his own brand of law, Aidan O’Mahony’s shoulder playing meet and greet for fun.

William Kirby was dominating a ragged midfield sector, helping himself to three fine scores, and Paul Galvin was a dynamo in the half forward line. Fifty-two minutes gone and Cooper extended Kerry’s lead out to 11 points, 1-17 to 1-6. Within two minutes Alan Dillon and Andy Moran sneaked two back. Kerry’s response?

Send in the finest footballer of his generation and while you’re thinking about that one, warm up and dispatch one of the country’s most lethal corner forwards just for kicks.

And yet the devil is in the detail. Seamus Moynihan, the country’s best defender, had to make do as a half forward for his fifteen minute cameo, the Kerry management unable to single out a defender to make way. And Mike Frank Russell coming in for the man who took his starting place because Crowley had worked himself to a standstill.

From there on there was more activity at the exit gates in the stands than on the pitch. Mayo threatened to have the last word when Michael Conroy pounced on Diarmuid Murphy’s initial save from David Brady’s shot for a 70th minute goal but this was all about Kerry. And so Russell penned the epilogue with a raking point from near midway out, pinning the last sequin to a perfect day.

The Mayo wait for liberation extends to a 54th year. Kerry’s threeyear ‘famine’ is ended. A Kingdom is sated.

Kerry: Diarmuid Murphy, Tom O’Sullivan, Michael McCarthy, Aidan O’Mahony, Tomas Ó Sé, Eamonn Fitzmaurice, Marc Ó Sé (0-1), Eoin Brosnan, William Kirby (0-3), Liam Hassett, Declan O’Sullivan (0-1), Paul Galvin (0-1), Colm Cooper (1- 5), Dara Ó Cinnéide (0-8, 5f, 1 ‘45’), John Crowley.

Subs: Seamus Moynihan for L Hassett (55 mins), Mike Frank Russell (0-1) for J Crowley (57 mins), Ronan O’Connor for D Ó Cinnéide (63 mins), Paddy Kelly for P Galvin (68 mins), Brendan Guiney for T Ó Sé (72 mins).

Mayo: Peter Buyrke, Dermot Geraghty, David Heaney, Gary Ruane, Peadar Gardiner, James Nallen, Pat Kelly, Ronan McGarrity, Fergal Kelly, James Gill, Ciaran McDonald (0-4, 2f), Alan Dillon (1-2, 0-1f), Conor Mortimer (0-1), Trevor Mortimer, Brian Maloney (0-1). Subs: David Brady for F Kelly (24 mins), Conor Moran for D Geraghty (h-t), Michael Conroy for J Gill (h-t), Andy Moran (0-1) for C Mortimer (65 mins), Paddy Navin for D Heaney (65 mins).

Referee: Pat McEnaney (Monaghan)