Conor McKeon

Kerry had 30% of the ball.

Now, in the average Gaelic football match, the ball is in play for about 17 minutes per half, something like that.

So, like, 30% of 17 minutes is like five minutes of the entire half that they had the ball.

So I don't necessarily think that it wasn't that Kerry weren't dangerous.

It was just that it didn't have the ball to be dangerous.

And then the stuff that I think a lot of us expected to see in last year's All-Ireland Final, the Donegal pace...

They were able to use it because they had the ball.

So the number of times where trying to get out of defence, they just set up one-on-ones and there might be somebody blowing past Sean O'Shea, who had a brilliant league and is a brilliant footballer, but isn't the quickest turning around going back to his goal.

And they just got the ball out so easily.

But it comes back to this thing and it's come into focus this year because of Ciarán McGeaney and Piggery and everything else.

But winning the ball is everything now.

Donegal pinned a Kerry team who didn't have the same energy for the game in for eight kickouts in a row and got loads of scores at that and killed the game.

And that's sort of all the defensive systems and all the, you know, like Kerry, they switched marker.

They didn't have McColl on Clifford, such as that.

They didn't score a two-pointer in the last year's All-Ireland final.

They'd put ever two on the board in the first couple of minutes yesterday.

So there's other obvious areas of improvement there.

But if you dominate the ball, and I said this the last time we were in with Joe, at the Kerry Donegal league game in Ballyshannon, I think Donegal only had two turnovers in the entire game.

So they are brilliant at holding on to the ball and actually depriving the opposition of oxygen.

And that's a huge part of it too.