By John Harrington

Painful defeats can either make you or break you as a team.

The fact that the Kerry ladies football team are back in another All-Ireland Final on Sunday after a sobering loss in last year’s decider against Meath suggests it’s been the latter for them.

A final quarter-collapse that saw them throw their pre-match tactical plan out the window and concede two goals on the way to a nine-point defeat meant it was a long and reflective winter for both the Kerry players and their joint managers Darragh Long and Declan Quill.

“I think our two wives and our kids, it was all picture and no sound for a good couple of weeks after that,” says Long. “We’re two very open guys, we’re very honest, we say it as it is.

“We didn’t look at it, we didn’t watch it back until a dirty cold morning, Sunday morning in Brosna GAA Club as a group, the whole lot of us sat down. We watched it, there was tears, there was laughter, there was honesty, there was criticism, but I think that game has made this group.

“There’s a steeliness, a mental toughness to this group that we have shown countless times this year. We’ve used the hurt from that day massively.

“It still hurts. It’ll probably hurt to the day we stop managing teams and till the day that the girls stop playing, but we’ve used that and we’ve taken the cork off that bottle a couple of times this year and we’re just hoping that there’s enough hurt there and left for Sunday.”

It’ll take more than hurt and a will to win to get the better of Dublin in Sunday’s Final.

Kerry will need to prove they’ve evolved in the last 12 months both in terms of their tactical nous and big-match mentality, and Long is confident that they have.

“I think we’re a more mature team this year,” he says. “There’s times, the Meath game for instance there a couple of weeks ago in Tralee, very bad evening weather-wise, huge wind, got a great lead up, played really well in the first half and we just had to show a different style in the second half and I think the characteristics that we showed and the composure that we showed on the ball, which we developed in the second half even more so against Mayo by tagging on the scores that we didn’t get in the Meath game.

“Watching back that game and seeing where we went wrong and being very honest about where we went wrong and trying to learn from it, that definitely helped us this year. I think our League campaign was close to being flawless which culminated in a superb performance here at headquarters against Galway.

“Have we hit the heights of that game since? We probably haven’t but, look, there’s still one game to go in the season.”

The loss of inspirational team captain Siofra O’Shea to injury is a big blow that many feel will tip the scales in Dublin’s favour.

Kerry still have a lot of firepower in attack without O’Shea, though, particularly in the shape of Louise Ni Mhuircheartaigh, the outstanding forward in the country.

At the age of 32 she’s playing better than ever, as evidenced by her remarkable performance in the All-Ireland sem-final against Mayo.

“I think Louise is probably closer to the end than she is to the beginning and she’d be the first to say that,” says Long.

“Some of the football she’s played in the last two or three years has been exceptional - 1-10 in an All-Ireland semi-final was an unbelievable achievement but it was more than that, the 1-10 that day, the ball she won, the leadership she showed and whether it’s me or Dec in the last couple of years but I think the style we’re playing now is really suiting her. She’s coming on the loop a lot.

“She’s an unbelievably accurate kicker, it’s very hard for any back in the country to mark her because you don’t know if she’s going to turn on her right, turn on her left, it’s very hard to know which is the weaker foot.

“But she puts countless hours of practice. While Siofra might be first at training, Louise would be the first out on the field, kicking balls, she’d be the last to leave and she does it back at home in Gallarus as well, she takes bags of balls off us nearly every training session but an exceptional talent, probably a generational talent, up there with the likes of Cora Staunton, Geraldine O’Shea, Mary Jo [Curran], to have played this game and she’ll go down as one of the best ever.”

Kerry have played Dublin twice already this year and beaten them twice – once in the League in Austin Stack Park and once in the Championship in Parnell Park - but those victories count for little ahead of Sunday’s match.

Dublin’s form graph has been on an upward curve all year, and they produced their best performance of the season yet in their All-Ireland semi-final win over Cork.

Players like Lyndsey Davey, Sinead Goldrick, and Ciara Trant from their four-in-a-row All-Ireland winning team have retired, but Long isn’t buying the suggest that Mick Bohan’s team are in a period of transition.

“They are a hugely experienced outfit,” he says. “I know Mick has said there’s 14 new girls in his group. We’re not too far off that over the course of two years as well.

“The difference is, Lauren Magee has x amount of All-Irelands, Leah Caffrey has x amount of All-Irelands. Martha Byrne does, Carla Rowe does, Jennifer Dunne does. So they have the experience going into another All-Ireland final.

“That day in Parnell Park we were really tuned in for it. We knew what was up for grabs - an All Ireland quarter final.

“On and off the field that day, myself, himself (joint-manger Declan Quill) and Mick had a couple of words at some stage but look, huge respect for what Mick has done in the game.

“I said it openly before, Mick has been very good to me and Declan since we came into the job, has been supportive of us. We might have relit a fire in Mick’s belly that day at Parnell Park. That , jeez, these boys bring a lot of energy to the game and maybe he is feeding off that as well.

“The middle third is going to be huge the next day. There is a lot of All-Stars in that middle third. If we can get on top in some of those big key battles out there, the likes of Lauren Magee, Anna Galvin, Niamh Carmody, Martha Byrne, Jennifer Dunne, Lorraine Scanlon, Cait Lynch, Aishling O’Connell – an old manager of mine said if you could win nine or 10 of the individual battles during the course of a game you will go very close to getting a result.

“We're just hoping we can come out on the right side of that.”

Friday, August 11

TG4 All-Ireland Ladies Senior Football Final

Dublin v Kerry, Croke Park, 4pm