WHEN CIAN O’NEILL was summoned to the Sky Sports studio to give his take on Kildare’s victory over Fermanagh on Saturday night, he reserved special praise for one of his most trusted lieutenants Kevin Feely.
Feely lines out at midfield for Kildare but at various stages during the game alternates into a full-forward role which keeps the opposing defence guessing.
“He’s probably one the most intelligent footballers I’ve ever worked with and because of that you can almost play him anywhere and he’ll still have a positive impact on the team performance,” O’Neill said.
Feely was nominated for an All-Star last season and has rediscovered his midas touch on Kildare’s four-game run to the Super 8s. At last, the Lilywhites look like a side playing up to their potential and Feely admitted that word has been following them around for some time.
“That word ‘potential’ has been thrown around a lot with us,” he said. “A quote that one of our (former) selectors, Padraig Brennan, said to us before is that: ‘Potential is not playing very well a lot of the time.’ And that sums us up nicely. I think definitely for large periods of the game we played to that potential.
“Physically and talent wise there’s massive potential but that only comes to fruition if you make good decisions and manage the game well.
“I think playing to our potential means making good decisions and managing the game well because physically and football wise we’ve always known that we can match any team in the country in terms of physical ability and what we can do with the ball.
“But what’s separated us from the better teams is that we don’t make good decisions, we don’t manage the game well. So it was great to see that today, we made better decisions, we learned from previous mistakes and managed the game well.
“In the last two games that’s where we’ve grown as a team, in that we’re not not doing ridiculous things on the ball that we were maybe doing in the league in terms of taking shots from outside the scoring zone or trying passes through the eye of a needle or taking the ball into contact in the centre of the pitch, which are all the things that were letting us down in the league.”
Feely is one of four former professional athletes in the Kildare ranks – alongside ex-AFL players Daniel Flynn, Paul Cribbin and Paddy Brophy. Feely, who played soccer in England with Charlton Athletic and Newport County, said Kildare had a “very tense” week as they looked to back up their win over Mayo seven days earlier.
“After Saturday wore off, after the elation of last Saturday wore off, it was very much a case of, ‘Jeez, we’ve been in this position before’, where we’ve had a big win and the next week or a couple of weeks later we’ve let ourselves down completely.
“So I think this week there was a massive emphasis on trying to focus on the job in hand because last year we let ourselves down in that respect, having a good Leinster campaign and then in the Armagh campaign taking our eye off the ball, if you like. Probably got ahead of ourselves.
“For that reason I think this week we were very tense, very keen not to let the elation of last week go to our heads but at the same time bringing through that positivity that we had last week.
“The work rate off the ball has gone through the roof since the Carlow game in terms of putting pressure on opposition teams in the middle third.
“From what the backs have told us, they’re getting huge energy from seeing us out the field putting in a huge work rate and trying to turn over lads in the right areas of the pitch. I suppose yeah, we were hopping off the top of the ground in that respect.”
Kildare head to the Super 8s where they’ll face Monaghan in Croke Park on Sunday afternoon, while a home game against Galway at Newbridge awaits in the second round of games.
“It’s back to where we were in Division 1 of the league. We’ll have a lot of the analysis done already for a lot of these teams. That’s going to be very helpful, we’ll have in the back of our minds as well that we’ve let ourselves down in a lot of those Division 1 games.
“Not all of them, but some of them we let ourselves down performance wise. So we’ll have a massive point to prove going into every single game we play in the Super 8s.
“It’s probably a bigger thing for the fans than it is for us knowing that they’re going to have an All-Ireland quarter-final being played in St Conleth’s.
“There’s no point trying to say we didn’t get a boost from last week, with having the support that we did have, you know, 50-50 with Mayo’s in St Conleth’s Park, it definitely helped us get over the line. So hopefully that’s replicated in our Super 8s game in St Conleth’s.
“We’re going to be underdogs going into every single game we play in the Super 8s. In terms of tension, yeah, that will be gone but we’ll still have an awful lot to prove. We haven’t really proved anything yet, based on our league form. So going into the Super 8s against top opposition we’re going to have to show that we can consistently match them.”
