I never bought in to the concept of hammering the hammer.
It’s a complete waste of tools.
Why would you use your best weapon doing nothing but cancelling out another one?
Why would you give your best player a role restricted to going after the opposition’s best player?
Don’t ignore the hammer that will be swung at you, sure. But send in your dogs to deal with that threat. Let them worry about dragging it down. You worry about striking the killer blow.
Why shouldn’t the opposition be more concerned about your strengths? Make sure you can swing your own hammer instead of sending it off on a standoff mission. A staring contest. A waste of its time and purpose.
Hammers weren’t designed to stop other hammers from swinging. They were designed to hammer nails and to hammer them into coffins. So use them for that.
Kerry have a midfield better equipped to win more ball right in the middle of the park direct from a kickout. Why on earth would Dublin need to go after that?
Dublin will lose the midfield battle. On Kerry’s kickouts.
Of their own kickouts, they will annihilate the same team.
Whoever thinks that Stephen Cluxton and Dublin would be forced to go down the throats of the two best midfielders in the country are in dreamland. They’ll win close to 100 per cent of their own possessions and they’ll decide where to launch the next attack from. And they’ll succeed at that too.
They don’t need two big men to compete with Moran and Maher in the air. If they could get some change out of Kerry’s kickouts, it would help, sure. But if they take care of their own, they’ll at least break about even with the Kingdom. And you’d fancy Dublin every day of the week to beat any team that they’re winning the same amount of ball as.
Any team.
It is much too simplistic to think that all Mayo had to do was start pushing up on Dublin’s kicks to dominate them. They did that – and they did dominate – in the last 10 minutes of the first semi final but that was mostly down to momentum and down to the fact that some of the Dubs were looking for the final whistle and they started to shy away when they were being asked serious questions.
Mayo had two chances at Dublin and that concept of pushing up wasn’t something the management hadn’t thought about. They looked at it, and they decided that they’d be a lot safer having the extra player in defence rather than risk losing the ball anyway and having to go man for man with those athletes, those footballers and all that vertigo-inducing Croke Park space.
Kerry face the same dilemma.
They can push up on Dublin if they’d like to. They do that at their own peril though because they leave their defenders hanging out to dry.
Anyway, who really thinks that pushing up man-on-man is going to convince Stephen Cluxton into lobbing one up for Moran and Maher to fetch? Really?
He’ll still find his runners. He’ll go longer and he’ll find Flynn and Connolly – Kilkenny has been chipping in of late. In fact, that entire Dublin middle eight are perfectly designed to winning their own ball. And it’s certainly not reliant on standing, jumping, and hoping they jump higher than the man right beside them.
It’s about finding space, hitting that space as aggressively as you can and relying on the best goalkeeper in Ireland to find you there when you need to be there.
Cian O’Sullivan, Jack McCaffrey, James McCarthy will be an absolute nightmare for the Kerry half forward line to track.
Bastick, Fenton, MacAuley – whoever the hell it is – don’t need to go toe-to-toe with the Kerry duo on their own kickouts and if the half forward three are picked out with the Kingdom pushing up, then by God I would not like to be one of those full backs wearing green on Sunday. Stranded in a sea of deserted grass with a tidal wave headed for you.
The logical way to approach this is to respect Dublin’s players and to definitely show Cluxton some bloody dues. Don’t think that pushing up will stop them, get back and get set up and give them the problems that they so obviously do have – not the ones we assume they have. Let them answer the questions they’ve always struggled to, by trying to break down a mass defence and go and win your own ball from your own kickouts.
Pushing up on Dublin is not going to force them to go after the Kerry hammer. They have no interest in doing that and nor should they.
They have their own attacks and they have more of them. Dublin have nothing to gain from hammering the Kerry hammer. Because even if they did, it wouldn’t change anything.
They’d still be winning their own ball and they’d still be a juggernaut coming at you.
Let Kerry worry about hammering the hammer. But they’d need a strategy to stop about five of them from swinging at their heads.
