The schools are back, the morning traffic is starting to gum up, the summer’s last knockings are upon us. Enter Dublin, enter Kerry. Wind Croke Park up and watch it go.
The last time these teams met in an All-Ireland semi-final, they produced the football match of the decade so far.
To imagine we’ll see the like of it on Sunday would be letting hope get the better of expectation. Jim Gavin’s team are 26 games unbeaten, going back to a league encounter in Killarney in February 2015.
Kerry people will enjoy bookending the streak if they can. They will have convinced themselves it’s possible, yet they come in here as glaring outsiders.
Comically underwelming
Rarely can a Kerry team have landed in an All-Ireland semi-final as such a mystery.
Their route to the last four has been almost comically underwhelming – Clare, Tipperary and Clare again.
For all of Tipp’s glory this summer, their Munster final display was their worst of the year and ended in a 10-point hammering. It told us nothing of Kerry’s bona fides.
Dublin are a blazing comet, burning off all in sight.
They skipped past Donegal in the quarter-final despite starting the game without James McCarthy, Jack McCaffrey and Rory O’Carroll and ending it without Bernard Brogan and Diarmuid Connolly.
That’s two Footballers of the Year (McCaffrey and Brogan), two players who were favourite for the award at different times this season (Connolly and McCarthy) and the only player in the country to have been nominated for an All Star in each of the past six seasons (O’Carroll).
No other team could survive such a draining of their resources.
Not Kerry, not nobody.
McCarthy is back for this, or so we’re told. Dublin said that before the quarter-final as well so we’ll believe it when we see it. Kerry are no more attached to the truth.
Poker game
Both teams were named at nine o’clock last night but the poker game between this pair has been going on for too long now to attach a lot of significance to them.
Not until the parade is done and the anthem is over will we have much of an idea what we’re seeing.
That’s all part of it. Bluff and double bluff. Truth and lies. Dublin and Kerry. A familiar couple of old messers back to do their thing.
Where else would you be?
