LOOKING BACK, PHILLY McMahon might have played a bigger role than most defenders in Colm Cooper’s recent decision to retire from inter-county duty.
When Eamonn Fitzmaurice took charge of the Kingdom in 2013, he reinvented Cooper from a corner-forward to a playmaker at 11.
Cooper thrived in his new role at centre-forward that year and lit up Croke Park with a devastating first-half display in the All-Ireland semi-final defeat to Dublin.
The Dr Crokes icon missed the entire 2014 season with a devastating knee injury, but returned to action in April 2015.
That September, Cooper lined out as a link man between the half-forward line and inside-forwards for the All-Ireland final against Dublin. The difference this time was the Dubs were ready for him.
Jim Gavin deployed McMahon on Cooper, with the instruction to break forward at every opportunity. McMahon outscored his illustrious opponent and gave a performance that delivered his first All-Star and catapulted him into the running for Footballer of the Year.
It also provided managers around the country with the blueprint to deal with Cooper – keep him busy tracking runners into his own defence.
“I took huge satisfaction that I’d done my job,” McMahon says about his performance that day.
“It wasn’t really about him. It was about could I keep my man away from getting scores, could I keep him off the ball as much as possible?
“That was my goal that year, whether I was marking him or another player that was it.
“I would have liked to mark him two or three years (earlier), let’s say around 2012 or 2011. I would have loved to mark him and see what he was capable of.
“All players in my head are really good if they’re not challenged, if they’re not taken outside their comfort zone. Who am I to question what he won or how good he was?
“He certainly is a player you have to respect and he’ll always be remembered by this generation anyway, that he was one of the best forwards.”
Last month, the 33-year-old ‘Gooch’ called it a day. His body wasn’t able to keep up with the rigours of inter-county football anymore.
“I basically told (Eamonn) that my body was tired, that I just wasn’t sure I had the energy,” Cooper said after the announcement.
McMahon admits he was surprised to hear the news from the Kingdom about his old foe.
“I thought he would have played that (league final),” he says. “But when you look at him winning the club championship, that was probably the last one on his bucket list.
“But if it was me, I would have played that game. Will I miss him? I don’t know. Would I miss any player that I mark? I don’t know. No, I won’t lose sleep.”
Just like teams adapted to Cooper’s role further out the field, McMahon noticed opposing teams started to treat him differently after what he considers his finest season in a Dublin jersey two years ago.
“It’s getting harder because you have to keep constantly evolving your game. It would have been easy for me in 2015, because I had a shift in the offensive play. Now other counties are copping onto that, so then I have to shift it again.
“There’s a lot of variables that change how you’re going to improve as a footballer. It just depends to how other players or teams adapt to how you play, but then also the things that you do extend away from the sport is very important.
“I want to get ahead of where I was last year. Small parts of my game, physically I want to be in better shape, I want to increase my fitness. I just want to get ahead of where I was last year.
“I want to change my mindset to feeling that I’m ahead of where I was last year. Then, physically, that’ll all come after that.
“I don’t want to be chasing (2015), I want to be chasing a new year.”
Without Cooper, Kerry ended Dublin’s long unbeaten run in the league final, and it also marked their first win over the Metropolitans in Croke Park since 2009
The biggest difference McMahon has noticed from Fitzmaurice’s men this year has been their physicality. He stresses he’s not “complaining about it.” It’s up to Dublin to figure out how they can counter it.
“They were aggressive,” he continues. “We’re aggressive. Every team’s aggressive. But you know the difference between being aggressive and going a step ahead, in a good way.
“I like playing teams that have something different about them. So if I said Kerry were a bit more aggressive and that was a difference, that makes us step outside our comfort zone and say, ‘how do we adapt to this?’
“If it’s the blanket defence, I don’t complain about that. These things make us evolve as players, become smarter. So if Kerry are more aggressive, what do we do?”
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