The David Clifford Effect: when a two-pointer feels like three 

The psychological lift it gave the Kilkenny players and their supporters and Carey himself was profound and O’Connor knew from bitter experience that the opposition could hardly be immune from such emotional contagion.

Certain footballers have had that stature. When Tyrone goaled on the stroke of halftime in the 2005 All-Ireland final, it was bad enough for Kerry that Tyrone had now moved into a three-point lead; worse was the identity of the finisher as well as the nature of his finish.

Peter Canavan in the run he made off Owen Mulligan and then passed the ball into the corner of the net with his supposed weak foot demonstrated to all just why he was known as Peter the Great and all felt the impact of it.

“The Tyrone fans erupted,” Mulligan wrote later in his autobiography. “The noise behind me was so loud I felt it was sucking me into the Hill.”

In that moment there was an air about Croke Park that pretty much stayed for all of the half-time break and the rest of the game: This is going to be Tyrone’s day – again. They just seem to have something over Kerry.

Michael Murphy belongs in that pantheon of player. Going into the 2012 All-Ireland final Mayo had kept a clean sheet in three of their previous four championship games but Jim McGuinness still sensed that their full-back line was vulnerable to diagonal high balls and goals and that his captain was just the man to exploit that.

“No matter who marked Michael he would cause them trouble on the edge of the square,” McGuinness would write in Until Victory Always. “If he got the right ball. So we practise that. We practise for that.” 

Every night, according to Rory Kavanagh in his own book, to the extent McGuinness stressed for them to take a solo to suitably compose themselves before delivering the necessary 40-metre diagonal ball.

When Karl Lacey duly heeded that advice three minutes in and Murphy rifled the ball past David Clarke with his marvellous if futile Nelligan-like aerial dive, it was, as Kavanagh put it, “like a thunderbolt. It was a goal that not just registered on the scoreboard but knocked the stuffing out of the Mayo defence.”

Unlike Carey, Canavan and Murphy, David Clifford has yet to score a goal in an All-Ireland senior final, though he did take Derry for four goals in the last U18 minor final back in 2017 and this past championship alone banged in eight goals, only one less than both Canavan and Murphy have each managed in their entire respective championship careers.

Yet in last Sunday week’s All-Ireland final he still illustrated the Carey Effect, to the point it can now be called the Clifford Effect, due to a mechanism that would not have been available to either Gowran’s or Ballygawley’s finest.

When David Clifford with his first touch of the ball on nine minutes nailed a two-pointer, a roar went up from the Kerry crowd that was the equal of what has greeted goals the county has registered at the same stage through the years: think Dara Ó Cinnéide early on in that aforementioned 2005 final, even Paul Geaney’s early strike in the 2014 final, also against Donegal.

Kerry were already in the ascendancy. Now their main man had got on the ball, and got up and running with a joyous score worth more than just a point.

And because it was from him, it was worth more than two points.

Two minutes later he thumped over another, coming on the loop to take a pop pass from Mike Breen. Again it generated a massive roar. Although no green flag had yet to be raised, it was as if Donegal had been hit by a one-two punch much like Murphy’s and Colm McFadden’s early goals had left Mayo reeling in the opening quarter of the 2012 final.

Without scoring a goal, it felt like Kerry had already bagged two. Because a two-pointer from David Clifford, as frequent as they may be, feels on All-Ireland final day at least the equivalent of a goal by anyone else.

Then there was that score on halftime. Already odes have been dedicated to it yet there’s even more to be said about it. The TV cameras wouldn’t have picked up on it nor any homemade Clifford cam on social media a la Eamonn Maguire’s clip that went viral but in one of Kerry’s attacks just prior to their last of the half, Paudie Clifford had taken on a two-pointer that failed to come off.

David subsequently gestured to him with his hands and a look he could possibly only give a brother: What were you doing there?! I’m here!

What little chance there was of Kerry and Paudie deviating from a play clearly rehearsed religiously in Currans and Fitzgerald Stadium as well as Fossa ended right there. Everyone from Brendan McCole to Jim McGuinness to those in the nosebleed seats in an 82,000-plus-filled Croker knew Kerry were going to trying to get the ball to David Clifford for the last shot of the half.

One of the great achievements of Jim Gavin’s FRC has been to significantly reduce the amount of lateral play that had plagued the sport the previous half-decade; it’s almost as if he and his committee adopted the mantra of the inventor of the basketball shot clock who explained his motivation for such an innovation was so that teams could no longer “screw around and stall”.

Yet for almost two minutes before the halftime hooter sounded last Sunday, that’s exactly what Kerry and Paudie Clifford did. Some jeers rang out around Croke Park, reminiscent of how Hill 16 had reacted to Donegal’s shocking massed defence during the 2011 All-Ireland semi-final.

Yet within 10 seconds of that hooter sounding, those jeers had transformed into resounding cheers, not just from the Kerry crowd but the thousands of neutrals that only All-Ireland final day attracts. The wait – though to their credit, the Cliffords didn’t extend for more than was necessary – had been more than worthwhile.

For all the great scores David Clifford has already scored in his career and all the ones he will kick in the future – including, undoubtedly, a goal in an All-Ireland final – that will likely be the defining and definitive score of his career.

Everything about him was distilled in that moment. The temperament. The technique. Even if the whole world played Gaelic football as it does association football, only a select few sportspeople on the planet would have been able to execute under such scrutiny.

It wasn’t just pure class but world class. “Lethal, man,” as Mulligan giddily roared at Canavan after he converted his pass into an assist in that 2005 final. “Lethal!” Without making the net dance once, let alone three times like he did against Galway in his first game of 2021 or against Tyrone up in Pomeroy in his first start of 2025, Clifford had essentially delivered a hat-trick.

And a stunning display of long-range score-taking comparable with Stephen Curry’s Olympian wonders against Serbia and France in Paris a year ago.

When the FRC surveyed the general public to gauge what it wanted to see more of, long-range shooting featured high in the wishlist. A shot that a Paul Flynn or Diarmuid Connolly used to regularly take on pre-Donegal 2014 had become a no-no on not just Gavin’s beat but his insistence. A low-percentage shot. Not worth the risk.

Now that it is, we’ve been regularly reminded of and treated to one of the great aesthetics of the sport: that sweet connection of boot on ball and then that sweet connection between the crowd and its team as it realises that ball pregnant in the air is going to curl in and between the uprights.

Clifford has taken that aesthetic to another level. It’s one thing to admirably watch a Flynn almost mechanically swing over point after point from that no.10 spot; another to see Clifford shake off his man and in less than a second get a shot off with either foot and have that foot somehow follow through as high as his shoulder while the ball soars and curls and the umpire reaches for that orange flag.

The two-pointer – something championed by the late great footballer as well as hurler Teddy McCarthy in his book over a decade ago – has been a gift to the sport.

The downside is that goals don’t have the value they once had. Pop over a fisted point and nail a free from outside the arc and it cancels out a screamer to the top corner of the net.

After the first public series of sandbox games that were the interprovincial matches in Croke Park last winter, with Cian O’Neill among the batch of current inter-county coaches that were there both in a participative and observational role that weekend, the four-point goal was abandoned.

You could see why. When Aidan O’Shea bagged an early goal for Connacht there was no way back for a hapless Leinster.

But it’s worth revisiting now, which is what Jim Gavin and his committee are doing with the sandbox games they’re currently staging.

Because for all the joys there are in Gaelic football, none remans as primal or as thrilling as a ball rippling a net.

Just bear in mind David Clifford isn’t shabby in that department either.

A four-pointer from him on All-Ireland final day could feel the equivalent of five.