AS A GAME it is long forgotten, a Sunday in March stuck in the section of the GAA calendar that few either look at or care about.
But for Eamonn Fitzmaurice, it was a watershed moment. His third match as Kerry manager had ended in the same fashion as the previous two: defeat. Yet this one was harrowing. A rookie forward line posted 16 wides and scored just once from play raising questions about their, and Fitzmaurice’s, future. Could they hack it at this level? Could he?
A dissenting voice provided the answer.
“People have been saying Kerry football has been finished for 125 years,” said Kieran McGeeney, the Kildare manager that day. “And they keep proving people wrong. They keep coming back.”
This week they most certainly are back. Appearing in their first All-Ireland final in three years, Fitzmaurice has built a new team out of nothing, coping with the season-ending injury to Colm Cooper and the retirements of Paul Galvin, Tomas O Sé and Eoin Brosnan.
Worse again, he has had a year when Declan O’Sullivan, Kieran Donaghy and Bryan Sheehan — his free-taker — have also been plagued by injury. And yet he has coped, reinventing his team to the point that nine of his likely starting XV are in line to make their All-Ireland final debut this Sunday.
Yet when you go back to his uncomfortable baptism last spring, when relegation from Division One was only avoided on the last day of the League programme, it was then that the seeds of this revolution were sown.
For while problems were inherited, so too was potential. James O’Donoghue, Fionn Fitzgerald, Johnny Buckley and Peter Crowley were identified as the future. So he invested in them and the dividends have been profitable. Similarly, this year’s graduates, Paul Geaney, Paul Murphy and Stephen O’Brien, have made their mark.
“Eamonn Fitzmaurice is a very shrewd man,” says Joe Brolly, a reluctant provider of cheap praise. “He saw that Kerry needed change and he went for it. He was prepared to sacrifice results in the League to find out who would make it and who would not.
“He experimented. Results initially were poor but he kept his nerve. He is being repaid for that now.”
He certainly is. In Kerry, where judgement is determined by events from June through to September, he is seen as the great reformer, the man who identified O’Donoghue as a star and then nurtured him into one, the guy who didn’t panic when O Sé, Brosnan and Galvin walked or when the Gooch, Donaghy and Declan O’Sullivan got injured.
The League became a laboratory and when fringe players were needed in the semi-final epic against Mayo, men he had tested out in spring came good in high summer — Jonathan Lyne and Pa Kilkenny.
A year previously, he oversaw a dramatic loss to Dublin in one of the greatest games of the modern era, a game Kerry lost partially because Dublin’s subs made an impact and his did not.
So he worked on building a panel, not just a team, and it was significant that he held big players like Darran O’Sullivan and Kieran Donaghy in reserve for the drawn semi-final with Mayo.
“There’s a big change after going on in the panel and there’s jerseys up for grabs and fellas are leaving it all out there to get in the team,” said Darran O’Sullivan.
“It’s keeping the likes of me and fellas who’ve been around a while on our toes, because there’s young lads there who’ve no medals and that was unheard of for a long time in a Kerry dressing-room and they’re hungry to get medals.
“They’re champing at the bit to get out there so it keeps things fresh. It’s been a massive change, but you know it’s good at the moment, there’s good hunger, there’s good battles going on inside.”
And Fitzmaurice has engaged in a battle of minds with his opposing number. Why else would the Gooch be introduced in the warm-up for the replay against Mayo? And why now is it being suggested he may play against Donegal? Why too was Donaghy named as a sub before starting the replay?
And it comes down to the fact Fitzmaurice is not afraid of risk. Minus Brosnan and Tomas O Sé, everyone told him his defence lacked experience. Yet for the replay against Mayo, he dropped his most experienced defender, Marc O Sé. It paid off.
“I know Marc well and I knew when I took the job that it would be difficult if I had to leave out players that I played with,” said Fitzmaurice afterwards. “I know the stock that Marc comes from and I knew there would be a severe reaction when he came on the pitch today and I think that was visible for everyone to see.”
Yet some of his gambles have been costly. Last year, when Kevin McManamon was introduced by Jim Gavin late on in that semi-final, Fitzmaurice counter-acted the move by choosing Jack Sherwood, an excellent but unproven defender, to man-mark him.
“What Dublin tend to do with McManamon is get him on someone with tired legs, giving him the best chance to do damage,” reasoned Fitzmaurice. “So we were ready to introduce a player to mark him, and that player was Jack because he was playing out of his skin in training.”
But McManamon scored and Sherwood was nowhere near him.
“You analyse your own performance on the line and think, ‘could we have done different things?’ But you have to trust the players. I’d be harder on myself than on them.”
From ruthless self-analyis, a fine tactician has emerged.
“Fitzmaurice is sharp,” says Brolly. “His tactical masterclass against the Dubs last August demonstrated that. If any further evidence of his abilities were required, look no further than his stunning Hogan Cup success this year with Pobalscoil Chorca Dhuibhne.
“At half-time against reigning champions St Pat’s Maghera, they looked doomed. The Kerryman used his 15 minutes in the changing room wisely. One of the adjustments he made was to push up on the Maghera sweeper, moving his corner back to corner forward. It was a bold move that proved to be a spectacular success. Fitzmaurice is no mug.”
And he has proven to be a fine man-manager too. With Declan O’Sullivan, a man raging against the dying of the light, he has nursed his sore knees and accepted a once-great is past his best.
“We’ll mind him early in the year,” he said of O’Sullivan after taking the job. It paid off when the business end of the Championship came around.
Similarly this season, when injury prevented Donaghy playing in the League, he stayed patient, always prepared to give him his chance. Against Mayo it proved to be a masterstroke.
And so here he is, in his first All-Ireland as a manager, but his seventh overall. Three times he won Sam as a player. Twice he was on the losing side before being part of the 2009 win as a selector under Jack O’Connor.
He knows Kerry have to win because it is a county where no other choice is allowed. And if he doubts that black-and-white scenario then all he has to do is think of O’Connor’s words two years after the 2011 All-Ireland final defeat.
“There is still a huge amount of hurt in the Kerry squad from that game,” O’Connor said.
“And I have never been able to watch it back. It’s too painful…
“Now imagine how the players feel?”
In another life, Fitzmaurice was a newspaper columnist and it’s worth looking back at what he wrote the day after the 2011 final.
“When my parents’ generation explained to me about Seamus Darby’s goal in 1982, I never quite got it. I never got the crystal clear recollections of that day, the tears and the sorrow,” he wrote.
“I understood what a disappointment it was but never managed to understand the emotional baggage that went with it. Now I understand.
“Yesterday’s defeat is my generation’s Darby moment. I am heartbroken, but most of all I’m heartbroken for [captain] Colm Cooper.”
So it seems inevitable that fire and brimstone is on the Kerry agenda.
And all their closed door training sessions weren’t for nothing. Jim McGuinness may be regarded as having the shrewdest brain in the business but come 3.30pm this Sunday, he will meet his match.
