IF IT IS ONE thing plotting to contain David Clifford when you have a team of All-Ireland finalists at your disposal then try doing it at club level.
This weekend Marc Ó Sé has to. Manager of Listry, the former Kerry great takes on Clifford’s Fossa in the Kerry Junior Premier football final. To add further context to Ó Sé and Listry’s task, Clifford and his brother Paudie contributed 0-11 of Fossa’s 14 points in their semi-final win last weekend over Ardfert.
Now Ó Sé is aiming to succeed where Padraig Joyce failed. Again, bear in mind Joyce had All-Star defenders and seasoned inter-county stars staring back at him in the dressing room as he drew up his tactics. After the All-Ireland SFC final everyone came to the swift conclusion that a flood is easier to stop than David Clifford.
“How do you go about stopping someone like that?” Ó Sé ponders on GAA Weekly, a podcast available to The42 members. “I mean the whole country has been trying to do it for years now.
“What you also have to consider is the fact is you have his brother Paudie in there, too, and Paudie is the closest player I have seen to Declan O’Sullivan.
“His ball skills are frightening the way he guards possession. It is very hard to get the ball off him. So when you have someone like Paudie continually delivering that ball into David, it is just so difficult.”
Clifford’s emergence as a genuine force couldn’t have been better timed and it seems almost too dramatic to be true that the day Eamonn Fitzmaurice held a press conference in Killarney to talk about Colm Cooper’s retirement that Clifford was practicing on the Fitzgerald Stadium pitch while Fitzmaurice was speaking. He was just 17 at the time, there to collect the baton that the Gooch had taken off Maurice Fitzgerald, who in turn had gathered it from Mikey Sheehy.
“The biggest regret I had in my career was that I never got to play with Maurice Fitzgerald,” says Ó Sé. “In 2001 I was on the Kerry panel but didn’t get to play and by 2002 (when Ó Sé made his Championship debut) he had retired.
“I’d loved to have played with him because I marked him once or twice in county championship games but then he retired.”
As soon as he did, the Gooch arrived. A new star was on the scene. Then he went and Clifford arrived.
“Just as the Gooch retires, you are thinking, there could be nobody this good,” says five-times All-Ireland winner, Ó Sé. “And then all of a sudden you have David Clifford. The things he can do with a football are just frightening.
“Think of the score he got against Mid-Kerry in the (Kerry) county final where he was falling, yet he wins the ball as he is falling and then kicks the ball over the bar. He is unmarkable.”
Does this cause Ó Sé sleepless nights?
“Believe it or not I never had a bother sleeping the night before a big game; I had plenty of sleepless nights after it and hope I don’t have any of those after next Saturday. This is where you want to be, in a final and taking on a team with some of the best players who ever play the game.
“Listry and Fossa, they are bordering clubs, it is a rivalry like Kerry/Cork, Liverpool/Manchester United, the intensity is so great. We played them already this year in Fossa and the crowds of people at the game were huge. This is going to be massive. I hope I sleep before it but I certainly hope I get some sleep after it.”
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