‘It was a tough year’: David Clifford on Kerry, red cards and the demands of being David Clifford

With less than six minutes left in the All-Ireland final Kerry were wriggling in quicksand, making one last lunge for an overhanging vine. Every team has a dance to create a two-point shot and in Kerry the music stops when David Clifford sets himself in the launch position.There were five points between the teams when the ball reached him at a remote northwesterly point on the arc, in front the Cusack Stand. The chance, though, promoted a right-footed attempt. Clifford made a smooth pass at the ball, like Ernie Els or Roger Federer, generating speed in the shot without any sudden movement. It climbed above the tip of the uprights and sailed over the bar.On the RTÉ commentary, Éamonn Fitzmaurice immediately understood the significance of the shot. “It’s an incredible kick, Marty,” he said. “It’s probably the first two-pointer he has kicked off his right leg this year and what a moment to do it.”More than that: it was the first right-footed two-pointer he had ever kicked for Kerry. With their season on the line, he trusted that shot.READ MOREA couple of months later, Fossa were leading by a point in the Kerry intermediate county final with less than six minutes remaining. In the last three years they had lost two finals and one semi-final, and, in their history, they had never reached the senior grade. All of that was loaded on the scales.Clifford gathered the ball around centrefield and slalomed into Kilcummin territory and then he performed the most daring pivot: he moved inside the two-point arc and intentionally dropped outside again, as if he had stepped on to a washed kitchen floor and suddenly realised it was still wet.The referee had his arm raised for an advantage, but Clifford carried on: the chance to shoot was on his right side. “Clifford off the right boot,” said the Clubber commentator in a tone of subtle scepticism. “Surely not. Can he kick it with the right? I think he can. It’s an unbelievable score.”In an interview four years ago, by which time he had won three All Stars and was about to be named Footballer of the Year for the first time, Clifford said that there was still room for improvement on his right side. So, he chased it. Thomas Edison coined the equation for genius: only one per cent inspiration.How good was he this year? Clifford lives on the equator between winning and losing, where the climate is always tropical: the sun scorches down, the rain falls hard. Whatever he does, his performances are never divorced from the outcome. In the county final he scored 15 points for Fossa; in the semi-final he scored 16; for East Kerry last week he kicked a two-pointer on the hooter to turn a loss into a win.David Clifford has been in outstanding form. Photograph: James Lawlor/Inpho His performances are chained to numbers too and when the language of praise and adoration is clapped out, they sometimes shoulder the load. In the All-Ireland final he scored 1-6, which was more than anybody else on the field. Over the span of the championship, he was the overall top scorer, the top scorer from play and scored the most goals. With Clifford, all of it is blended into the sauce until you can’t distinguish the basil from the oregano.Nobody notices until the numbers drop suddenly, like a bad day on the Iseq index. He says there are “always other fellas I can throw the ball off to if I’m getting extra attention or whatever and there’s been loads of days where I might hardly score at all and other fellas will step up”.But he never has permission to be just a provider or a cog in the wheel. The auditors only want to see the numbers. “I probably don’t look at the personal numbers on it,” he says. “Like, I suppose my job with Fossa is to get the scores, do you know what I mean? That’s the way our game plan is set up.”That is also true, though, of Kerry and East Kerry and every team he has played for since he was a boy. Finishers are yoked to the bottom line.“I suppose, look, that’s what I enjoy doing.”In a superb piece of analysis in the Irish News last month, Cahair O’Kane drilled into the three nominees for Footballer of the Year and produced a comparative panel of their statistics from the championship. Across more than a dozen metrics, Clifford had the best numbers in two-thirds of the categories, but among the exceptions one stood out: Ryan O’Donoghue had been involved in 17 turnovers for Mayo and Clifford had been involved in none for Kerry.“I suppose, it’s not as if you shouldn’t be tackling either,” he says. “Like, I suppose, the manager wouldn’t be too happy with that.”David Clifford signs a jersey during a training clinic last week in Cork. David Clifford is a Davy brand ambassador. Photograph: Brian Arthur [ Cillian O’Connor gets the ending he deserved to one of the greatest careers in GAA historyOpens in new window ]Some species of sharks can lay motionless at the bottom of the sea for long periods and there are times in Kerry games, when the ball is elsewhere, that Clifford is a study in stillness. It always seems like it is by design. “Well, sometimes it is anyway,” he says, smiling.In Kerry, every season has a binary quality. Without an All-Ireland, it is a failure. Clifford suggests that it must be like that in other counties too, but only from time to time and in very few other places. In Kerry, the commandments are handed down from the Old Testament.“Obviously, there’s major disappointment that you didn’t get over the line [against Mayo]. You kind of watch it back and see snippets of it and stuff and you try to come up with your own ideas about why it didn’t go well. We started relatively well and got a big lead in the game [with Clifford’s first-half goal] and then Mayo thundered back into the game. We missed three or four shots in the next few attacks.“We kind of couldn’t find the answers for a while and they took over in the second half. Everyone knows momentum can be hard to wrestle back. We rallied late in the game, but we came up short ultimately.”Kerry's David Clifford dejected after missing a two-pointer in All-Ireland final. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho After his right-footed two-pointer Clifford had another chance to draw the game from outside the arc. In those situations, he was never going to shovel it off to somebody else: the shooter shoots. “I struck it well, but it seemed it was kind of always just offline. It started probably at the right post, and I needed to start it at the left post. I’d love to have it back and take it again, but sure, we can’t.”It had been a topsy-turvy year. When Kerry won the All-Ireland in 2025 there were long stretches of the season when the exhaust was hanging down and it was sparking against the tarmac as they went; this year, they slid into the ditch a couple of times, but until the final, it never looked like they wouldn’t reach their destination.“It was definitely a tough year. I suppose we had a couple of kind of peaks and troughs. We were kind of flying in the league and then got rocked back in the league final [against Donegal]. Then you’re having to come again. We did well in Munster, but Donegal beat us again in the first round of the group so you’re having to come again. We were poor [that day]. We missed a lot of chances in the first half and then they were clinical. They were a good bit better than us on the day. It was a gun to the head situation then that we had to improve.”That game went rogue. Jim McGuinness escaped censure for pushing a Kerry player during a melee at the end of the first half; earlier Clifford had evaded punishment for leading with his elbow into the neck area of Caolan McGonagle. Both incidents were lightning rods for uproar and the usual rounds of whataboutery for the next couple of days, but no retrospective action was taken by the GAA. Did Clifford think he was lucky?“I was happy to stay on the pitch, definitely,” he says, without entering a plea.Did he think it would come back to bite him?Referee Thomas Murphy shows David Clifford of Fossa a red card in the 2023 All-Ireland Junior Club Football final. Photograph: Bryan Keane/Inpho “I don’t know really. I suppose in the middle of a game you don’t think about it. Then the fact that we had got beaten so well you’re kind of saying, ‘we got to sort this out’.”For all of his playing life he has been a marked man. Before the new rules came in, it wasn’t unusual for Clifford to be double-teamed; that is harder now. Was he blackguarded along the way? The answer must be yes, although he deflects the question. At other times in his career his response to provocation wasn’t always as controlled as it is now. He came to a reckoning with that.“Did I get upset with someone marking me? Not in a good few years anyway. I was sent off a couple of times when I was younger. One time with Kerry and I got sent off a couple of times with East Kerry [and in the final minute of the All-Ireland junior final with Fossa]. It was just stupid stuff. It’s a shitty feeling when you do get sent off.”After the All-Ireland he went on holiday with his partner and son to a part of Spain where “it wasn’t a big Irish spot”. At home it is impossible to take cover. Every GAA star lives in the mainstream of local life. The people who talk about him want to talk to him. In his job as a teacher in Killarney, his public are looking up at him from behind their desks.[ For the average GAA player, this time of the year brings a mix of regret and reliefOpens in new window ]But the attention is omnipresent: it has no filters or boundaries. In an interview with Michael Foley after he retired, Brian Fenton spoke about a night he spent in Clifford’s company in Killarney.“He was a Beatle. People were genuinely coming up and just touching him. Like they were touching Jesus Christ,” he said.You wonder if he tires of it: the micro intrusions on his time from strangers and people he might know a little; the endless rounds of questions about football, as if he had thoughts on nothing else.“It’s an interesting one. Like everyone says that I probably get sick at times of talking about Kerry and the intercounty game, but I would never get sick of talking about underage football or club football, because it’s not concerning me, do you know what I mean?“All of my friends are playing with different clubs, so I never get sick of it in that sense. But there are times I suppose with the whole intercounty thing, when the seasons are long and stuff, there are times when you are tired.”Fossa’s David and Paudie Clifford celebrate after the All-Ireland Junior Club Football Championship final. Photograph: Bryan Keane/Inpho On Tuesday night, a proposal to create a four-to-six week break in the off-season for Kerry’s intercounty players was defeated after what was described as a “fiery” debate at the county board. Clifford has experienced those seasons where the horizon keeps moving. In 2022 he lined out in nine different competitions for five different teams and ended up winning eight of them. Winning shortens the road.In January 2023 that season ended with Fossa in Croke Park. For the Cliffords, Croke Park had always been a place of pilgrimage. His parents had been stalwarts of the Kerry Supporters Club and David, Paudie and their sister Shelly joined them on the bus trips to wherever Kerry would lead them.“We basically went to every championship match and a good shot of league games and stuff like that. I remember being at games in Croke Park and being jealous of the people living in Dublin because you’d be mad to go for a kick after watching the game. But then you’d have to travel home four or five hours or whatever so it would be too late by the time you got home.“It’s one of the days that stands out, being there with Fossa, and seeing players [that you grew up with] getting to play there and the supporters being up there. And even the idea of having a function in Dublin and it not being with Kerry, but being with Fossa.”[ Halfway there? Gaelic games integration timeline is no clearer after Dáil committeeOpens in new window ]News of Éamonn Fitzmaurice’s appointment as the new Galway manager broke on the day before we met. Fitzmaurice gave Clifford his senior debut with Kerry, eight years ago now, and after he finished with Kerry he was involved with Fossa for four years. You can imagine what Clifford thought: “They’re lucky to have him. Definitely.”Before this year’s All-Ireland final Fitzmaurice wrote a beautiful portrait of Clifford in the Irish Examiner and, in that piece, he told a story about the one-on-one meetings that management used to have with each player before the season began. As a rookie, Clifford wasn’t spared friendly fire.“Liam Hassett [Kerry selector] was the dog that went after fellas with hard questions. He thrived in the role. He threw a few scuds in David’s direction, to assess him. He didn’t even blink and handled everything with aplomb. I struggled not to laugh. Liam was doing his level best to ruffle David’s feathers but try as he might he couldn’t.”Nothing ever changed.