It probably should have come as no surprise that a guy that scored 4-04 in an All-Ireland minor final would go on to enjoy a successful season in his first campaign in intercounty football, but yet, here we are talking about David Clifford’s credentials as a potential Footballer of the Year candidate.
The prodigious 19-year-old has been incredible for Kerry this season and has scored a goal in every single one of his side’s All-Ireland quarter-final group stage games despite the Kingdom’s early exit from this year’s All-Ireland championship.
Clifford was sensational for Eamonn Fitzmaurice’s side and a shot chart from his three games against Galway, Kildare and Monaghan shows just how accurate he was with the Fossa forward converting a remarkable 78% of his shots on goal.
David Clifford is extraordinary. Super 8s
0-02 from 2 on frees (yellow)
4-00 from 4 on goal attempts (red)
0-12 from 17 (71%) on point attempts (white = left, black = right)That’s 78% (4–14 from 23) in total scoring ~11 points more than an avg intercounty player would #Yeesh pic.twitter.com/mTuVycDcZP
— dontfoul (@dontfoul) August 8, 2018
Comparison with David Clifford:
Clare: 0-1
Cork: 0-2
Galway: 1-4
Monaghan: 1-3
Kildare: 1-4— Maurice Brosnan (@m_brosnan) August 8, 2018
RTE analyst Joe Brolly hailed the forward last month as the first ‘genuine superstar of Gaelic Football’ and said that his inability to shirk responsibility is something very rarely seen of someone so young.
“This kid Clifford, who I thought was gonna take a while to bed in, he is the first genuine superstar of Gaelic football to come along in a number of years. 1-5 the last day on scraps, 1-3 today,” Brolly said during RTE’s coverage of the Monaghan game.
“This kid is six-foot-three or four, we saw what what was happening off the ball to him and he stood up throughout that second half.
“Those Monaghan boys put it on you from start to finish and he stood up to them like a 25 or 26 year old. He’s two footed, he will not be put off his notion, some of the scores he got today on scraps, he wasn’t really entitled to get those.”
