YOU GET THE manager of Beaufort, Éanna O’Malley, on the phone and pitch the idea to him; to speak to some of the managers in the Kerry intermediate championship that have sent teams out to play against Paudie and David Clifford.
He answers that he had a thought in his head that he could form a support group for vanquished managers. Where they could sit around a circle and talk about their feelings.
One of the themes they could all touch upon was the need to make plans for the most creative players in the country; the best playmaker in Paudie, the best finisher who can conjure something from nothing in David.
And at the same time, not send your players out with the fear of two Gods in their hearts. As if this is just another game.
The quarter-final was played in Beaufort. O’Malley had Mike Breen marking Paudie.
“For us, we only had a week to prepare,” notes O’Malley.
“We won our group, they got out of their group and that evening we knew we had the draw.
“The practical reality of it, with the nature of the competition that you are going to go the whole way, you are going to play six games in six weeks. You have to have an awful lot of your preparation done in terms of how you attack and how you defend.
“The Tuesday night, you can’t really do a whole pile, only go on what other teams have done and we had played them the year before and had beaten them by a point. So we would have had some experience of playing against them.
“The year before, David wasn’t quite on his game the way he is now so we knew they were going to be a completely different prospect.”
Getting some close attention in a previous intermediate final against Milltown/Castlemaine. Lorraine O’Sullivan / INPHO
Lorraine O’Sullivan / INPHO / INPHO
*****
Cliffords Kerry IFC scoring 2025
Round 1 – Fossa 2-19 John Mitchels 1-11
David Clifford 1-8 (0-1f)
Paudie Clifford didn’t play
Round 2 – Fossa 4-16 Firies 0-18
David Clifford 0-9 (2 2pt play, 2 2pt free)
Paudie Clifford didn’t play
Round 3 – Kilcummin 0-22 Fossa 0-10
David Clifford 0-5 (1 2pt, 0-1f)
Paudie Clifford came on as a sub
Quarter-final – Fossa 2-11 Beaufort 0-15
Paudie Clifford 2-4 (1 2pt)
David Clifford 0-5 (0-2f)
Semi-final – Fossa 3-14 Beaufort 0-20
David Clifford 1-5 (1 2pt free, 1 2pt play)
Paudie Clifford 0-3 (0-1 ’45)
*****
And how.
Beaufort led at half time by six points and still held that same lead with 15 minutes to go.
Paddy Sheehan made a dart down the left side that opened up enough space for Cian O’Shea to square for Paudie to finish with a left foot shot to the net.
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Then Paudie kicked a two-pointer and it got very interesting.
In a Beaufort attack, the ball was spilled and a defender hacked the ball downfield. With the ball rolling away from him towards the sideline, David executed a deft chip up on a soaking day with his left foot.
He spotted Paudie inside and played a perfect handpass with his right hand. Paudie made his way to goal, manipulated the defenders into position, slammed the brakes on and produced a deft chip over goalkeeper Fionn O’Neill from all of about seven yards.
O’Neill went down early and for a second it looked as if he might recover, but the ball bounced to the net to take the lead.
And look, the usual demeanour of a manager on the sideline is to be focused entirely on your own team. But O’Malley knew he had been witness to genius.
“It’s fantastic see it (David’s chip) and the ball was going away from him a small bit too. It highlights the skill of it a little more. And I think he raised it with his left leg and then punched it with his right hand,” says O’Malley.
“It’s just… It’s a bit like with Paudie. They see things because time slows down for them and they can execute these things under pressure.”
Because the truth is this. For 99% of players, they might run the same line as Paudie Clifford had. They might be able to draw a defender out to a side and skip inside to get a look at the goal.
What would happen then is 99% of the aforementioned players would tense up and try to take the net out of the rigging. 0.9% might try to place it in the way a Peter Canavan or Gooch would.
"Did you mean it? I did because if I was going for a point I would have hand passed the point!"😅
For those of you who thought he didn't mean it, never question the genius of Paudie Clifford😅👏
“But you have to admire the pure brilliance. You can almost take a little consolation out of it to some extent.”
Beaufort have been in the throes of some gut-wrenching championship defeats of late. Beaten in the 2020 and 2021 finals by Spa and Na Gaeil among them.
Late in the evening as the sting started to ease, O’Malley asked some players to rate the most haunting defeats of recent years. Despite losing a six-point lead in the last quarter, this didn’t feel as bad.
“You were beaten by a team with two of the greatest players of all time. They are right up there. And there’s no shame in saying that and it’s great to be playing against them,” says O’Malley.
“And in fairness, the two of them are supreme competitors. The way they do it for their club, it’s just fleeting moment when you are up against it, a bit of a thrill.”
In preparation, they had established a few principles. At all costs, they would starve David of possession. In order to do that, they would have to deny Paudie the ball, as his first thought is to hit David.
Every attack had to go dead, for a kickout reset.
“And then, when that didn’t work and when you didn’t have the ball it was trying to double up on him, particularly on the two-point shots,” said O’Malley.
“That would have been our thing. A man marking him and another close by that you want diving on his boot.”
By contrast, imagine you are Jerome Stack. From Listowel, he’s covered a few bases in his coaching career. He was in charge of Roscommon’s St Brigid’s when they were defeated in the All-Ireland final by Glen of Derry.
And now he is the Fossa manager. Wouldn’t you love that gig? Wouldn’t you have the cigars and deckchairs out on the sideline?
I mean, I’m sure there’s hard work in it somewhere, but not in delivering the team talk.
Last weekend, it was the turn of James Foley, the former right-hand man of Peter Keane when he was manager of Kerry to face Fossa.
Now manager of Kilcummin, they faced Fossa in the semi final. When the two met in the group stages, Kilcummin won by twelve points only a fortnight before.
This time, the brothers weren’t so prominent in the closing stages. They gathered up 1-8 between them all the same.
“The reality is, they are going to score what they are going to score. I suppose you have got to think that possession is key. While you have the ball they cannot score so when you have possession you have to mind it,” says Foley.
How do you mark that?🤯
That man David Clifford again, sells one dummy, sells another, and over the black spot🤩
“Once Paudie has the ball in his hand it is mighty difficult to get it off him because he is just brilliant on the ball. By the same token, there is another 13 players on the team you have to take account of as well.
“Unfortunately, we came up short. We limited them to 1-8 and the others scored 2-6 and that capsized us.”
When you ask about how much time he devoted to the eternal philosophical debate of man-marking or zonal defence, he asks if we might have asked Jim McGuinness for an insight into the same question.
“The thinking was we assigned a man marker to each of them and everybody else was to help out once it came into the scoring area,” he explains.
“Anyone watching the game would have seen that was what we were trying to do. To what extent we did it, I would claim we did it well. If we limited them to 1-8, 1-5 for David and 0-3 for Paudie, that was what we tried to do.
“1-8, I would claim we were reasonably successful in that. But we conceded 2-6 to other players. They attract attention, they will draw what is there and we came up short in the other areas.”
There is always one other, more earthy and old-school approach.
Why not get wired into them?
Sure, it might not have worked for Stewartstown in the All-Ireland Junior final of 2023. But all the same…
Stewartstown get stuck into David Clifford. This did not work out for them. Bryan Keane / INPHO
Bryan Keane / INPHO / INPHO
“Quite straight, it never came up,” says Foley.
“It’s not something we set out to do. That was never part of the plan and I don’t think it is a necessary part of the plan. That’s just my personal opinion.
“Have clubs done it? I didn’t see Beaufort doing it. We didn’t do it. I haven’t seen that much to be honest with you.”
This Sunday, it’s the intermediate final played at Austin Stack Park against An Ghaeltacht.
The men from the west produced a mild surprise by beating Legion last weekend to make it this far.
It will fall to their manager, Fergal Ó Sé, to make the impossible, possible.
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Facing Fossa and clamping the Cliffords - the manager's view from the sidelines
YOU GET THE manager of Beaufort, Éanna O’Malley, on the phone and pitch the idea to him; to speak to some of the managers in the Kerry intermediate championship that have sent teams out to play against Paudie and David Clifford.
He answers that he had a thought in his head that he could form a support group for vanquished managers. Where they could sit around a circle and talk about their feelings.
One of the themes they could all touch upon was the need to make plans for the most creative players in the country; the best playmaker in Paudie, the best finisher who can conjure something from nothing in David.
And at the same time, not send your players out with the fear of two Gods in their hearts. As if this is just another game.
The quarter-final was played in Beaufort. O’Malley had Mike Breen marking Paudie.
“For us, we only had a week to prepare,” notes O’Malley.
“We won our group, they got out of their group and that evening we knew we had the draw.
“The practical reality of it, with the nature of the competition that you are going to go the whole way, you are going to play six games in six weeks. You have to have an awful lot of your preparation done in terms of how you attack and how you defend.
“The Tuesday night, you can’t really do a whole pile, only go on what other teams have done and we had played them the year before and had beaten them by a point. So we would have had some experience of playing against them.
“The year before, David wasn’t quite on his game the way he is now so we knew they were going to be a completely different prospect.”
*****
Cliffords Kerry IFC scoring 2025
Round 1 – Fossa 2-19 John Mitchels 1-11
Round 2 – Fossa 4-16 Firies 0-18
Round 3 – Kilcummin 0-22 Fossa 0-10
Quarter-final – Fossa 2-11 Beaufort 0-15
Semi-final – Fossa 3-14 Beaufort 0-20
*****
And how.
Beaufort led at half time by six points and still held that same lead with 15 minutes to go.
Paddy Sheehan made a dart down the left side that opened up enough space for Cian O’Shea to square for Paudie to finish with a left foot shot to the net.
Then Paudie kicked a two-pointer and it got very interesting.
In a Beaufort attack, the ball was spilled and a defender hacked the ball downfield. With the ball rolling away from him towards the sideline, David executed a deft chip up on a soaking day with his left foot.
He spotted Paudie inside and played a perfect handpass with his right hand. Paudie made his way to goal, manipulated the defenders into position, slammed the brakes on and produced a deft chip over goalkeeper Fionn O’Neill from all of about seven yards.
O’Neill went down early and for a second it looked as if he might recover, but the ball bounced to the net to take the lead.
And look, the usual demeanour of a manager on the sideline is to be focused entirely on your own team. But O’Malley knew he had been witness to genius.
“It’s fantastic see it (David’s chip) and the ball was going away from him a small bit too. It highlights the skill of it a little more. And I think he raised it with his left leg and then punched it with his right hand,” says O’Malley.
Because the truth is this. For 99% of players, they might run the same line as Paudie Clifford had. They might be able to draw a defender out to a side and skip inside to get a look at the goal.
What would happen then is 99% of the aforementioned players would tense up and try to take the net out of the rigging. 0.9% might try to place it in the way a Peter Canavan or Gooch would.
How many would attempt to chip the ‘keeper?
“It’s just brilliant,” says O’Malley.
“We were gutted, absolutely gutted.
“But you have to admire the pure brilliance. You can almost take a little consolation out of it to some extent.”
Beaufort have been in the throes of some gut-wrenching championship defeats of late. Beaten in the 2020 and 2021 finals by Spa and Na Gaeil among them.
Late in the evening as the sting started to ease, O’Malley asked some players to rate the most haunting defeats of recent years. Despite losing a six-point lead in the last quarter, this didn’t feel as bad.
“And in fairness, the two of them are supreme competitors. The way they do it for their club, it’s just fleeting moment when you are up against it, a bit of a thrill.”
In preparation, they had established a few principles. At all costs, they would starve David of possession. In order to do that, they would have to deny Paudie the ball, as his first thought is to hit David.
Every attack had to go dead, for a kickout reset.
“And then, when that didn’t work and when you didn’t have the ball it was trying to double up on him, particularly on the two-point shots,” said O’Malley.
“That would have been our thing. A man marking him and another close by that you want diving on his boot.”
By contrast, imagine you are Jerome Stack. From Listowel, he’s covered a few bases in his coaching career. He was in charge of Roscommon’s St Brigid’s when they were defeated in the All-Ireland final by Glen of Derry.
And now he is the Fossa manager. Wouldn’t you love that gig? Wouldn’t you have the cigars and deckchairs out on the sideline?
I mean, I’m sure there’s hard work in it somewhere, but not in delivering the team talk.
Last weekend, it was the turn of James Foley, the former right-hand man of Peter Keane when he was manager of Kerry to face Fossa.
Now manager of Kilcummin, they faced Fossa in the semi final. When the two met in the group stages, Kilcummin won by twelve points only a fortnight before.
This time, the brothers weren’t so prominent in the closing stages. They gathered up 1-8 between them all the same.
“The reality is, they are going to score what they are going to score. I suppose you have got to think that possession is key. While you have the ball they cannot score so when you have possession you have to mind it,” says Foley.
“Once Paudie has the ball in his hand it is mighty difficult to get it off him because he is just brilliant on the ball. By the same token, there is another 13 players on the team you have to take account of as well.
“Unfortunately, we came up short. We limited them to 1-8 and the others scored 2-6 and that capsized us.”
When you ask about how much time he devoted to the eternal philosophical debate of man-marking or zonal defence, he asks if we might have asked Jim McGuinness for an insight into the same question.
“The thinking was we assigned a man marker to each of them and everybody else was to help out once it came into the scoring area,” he explains.
“Anyone watching the game would have seen that was what we were trying to do. To what extent we did it, I would claim we did it well. If we limited them to 1-8, 1-5 for David and 0-3 for Paudie, that was what we tried to do.
“1-8, I would claim we were reasonably successful in that. But we conceded 2-6 to other players. They attract attention, they will draw what is there and we came up short in the other areas.”
There is always one other, more earthy and old-school approach.
Why not get wired into them?
Sure, it might not have worked for Stewartstown in the All-Ireland Junior final of 2023. But all the same…
“Quite straight, it never came up,” says Foley.
“It’s not something we set out to do. That was never part of the plan and I don’t think it is a necessary part of the plan. That’s just my personal opinion.
“Have clubs done it? I didn’t see Beaufort doing it. We didn’t do it. I haven’t seen that much to be honest with you.”
This Sunday, it’s the intermediate final played at Austin Stack Park against An Ghaeltacht.
The men from the west produced a mild surprise by beating Legion last weekend to make it this far.
It will fall to their manager, Fergal Ó Sé, to make the impossible, possible.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
Clifford Bros Double trouble Fossa GAA Kerry Kilcummin