What a crazy time!
It was 2014 when Kerry last took on Donegal in the All-Ireland SFC final, with the Kingdom winning 2-9 to 0-12.
Yet despite it being over a decade ago, Jim McGuinness was at the helm and their talisman Michael Murphy was in situ as well.
Despite being at the forefront of tactical innovation, for better or worse, it wasn’t enough for McGuinness and his side to land their second title in three years.
And in the build-up to the match, the manager’s methods had come under scrutiny when he was accused of spying on his rivals.
The accusations arose when members of the Kerry board suspected something was amiss during a training session at Fitzgerald Stadium in Killarney.
Cracking branches and rustlings alerted them to man who was hiding in a tree overlooking the ground, who subsequently jumped and ran after his rumbling.
However, during his escape, his wallet fell out of his pocket and he was identified as Patrick Roarty; a Donegal man living in Killarney, from Glenties like McGuinness, and for whom McGuinness had been best man nine years previously.
Kerry chairman Patrick O’Sullivan, who was also chairman in 2014, told the story of the bizarre and hilarious sequence of events.
He recounted: “Nobody knew where Kerry were training at the time, which was a departure because it’d be said that you could read Kerry like a book. We would have gone to Fota Island in the past and there were probably people waiting above in Fota looking for us but we had the closed A v B session in Fitzgerald Stadium.
“I remember it being the sunniest of evenings, not a puff of air but I saw this tree shaking 100 miles an hour above the field. I said to [selector] Mikey Sheehy that there was somebody in the tree and he told me I was doting.
“Eddie Walsh and Niall O’Callaghan went up to have a look, came back and said there was nobody there. But no sooner had they come back the tree took off again. They were our two Sherlock Holmes and they saw him the second time around. I think he left a wallet behind him and Eddie, the pure detective, did some sleuthing into who he was.
“That bit of attention was something Kerry used at the time because we weren’t really expected to win that game. We were up against a Donegal team that had beaten Dublin.”
McGuinness had joked after his side’s semi-final win over Dublin that he had been asking his friends in Kerry to keep an ear to the ground, saying: “I have a great group of friends down there and I am sending them an odd text at the moment that if you hear anything in the Kerry team to let me know.”
But he made it clear that Roarty was not associated with Donegal, and also pointed out that spying was common place in the game.
He said: “He is not associated with our camp but there’s no doubt he’s probably watching training.
“And we have that! We train in MacCumhaill Park (Ballybofey) some days and we have people looking down from the (neighbouring) hotel.
“We were playing a team previously and we worked out that one of the coaches was staying in a local hotel. This is what goes on, it’s fine margins.
“Kerry, for years, had open sessions and people were just going in. Tyrone, years ago, were just going in, making notes.”
