Dublin legend Jimmy Keaveney has hailed the calmness, with which Stephen Cluxton kicked the point that won this year’s All-Ireland for Dublin.
The Dubs goalkeeper struck at the death of September’s decider to skink Kerry by a single point, the Kingdom having held a four-point lead not too long before in what was a classic Sam Maguire decider.
And three-time All-Ireland winner Keaveney, himself a dead ball specialist, says that – at such a high pressure moment - there was no better man than the Dublin goalkeeper to come up and kick the latest in a string of successful summer frees.
"Stephen Cluxton is as cool as you can get and I had no doubt in the world that day that he was going to kick it over the bar,” Keaveney says on the RTE documentary ‘Dublin v Kerry - The Myth And The Magic’, which will be televised on December 26.
“The pressure is on you. I remember I got a penalty in an All-Ireland final against Kerry and I said to somebody if you score you score if you don’t you don’t. I wasn’t saying, ‘This is the end of the world if I don’t get this penalty’.
"Stephen might have had that, if it did go wide, well they were still in the All-Ireland final’, it was a drawn game. That was what he would have been comfortable with but I was convinced it was going over the bar."
Keaveney added that he was astonished by the arrogance shown from Kerry folk ahead of the final, with the Dubs legend believing that a lot of Kingdom fans thought that they would just turn up and walk away with another Sam after a game against a side who had not won the national honour in 16 years.
"In all my years going to Kerry, I never saw the Kerry public — they normally hide their confidence,” he said.
“But they were saying it was only a matter of going up and picking up the Sam Maguire Cup. They were so cocky, they really were, which amazed me."