David Clifford and brother Paudie set to miss Kerry’s opening league fixtures

Footballer of the Year David Clifford, and his All Star brother, Paudie, won’t be available for Kerry’s first National League game against Derry on Saturday evening in Tralee, and the Fossa pair are unlikely to be involved the following weekend when the Kingdom head to Clones to take on Monaghan.

Kerry manager Jack O’Connor confirmed that the brothers have only rejoined the squad in the last week or two, having been given a much needed break after the exertions of 2023 when they played a huge amount of games with Kerry, their club Fossa, and East Kerry in the county senior championship – as well as dealing with the death of their mother, Ellen, last May.

At a media briefing on Monday, Paudie, who was ratified as the new team captain last week, said he expects the two of them to be ready to go for Kerry’s third game, a home fixture against Mayo on February 17 in Tralee.

Meanwhile, O’Connor will be without a number of established players for the foreseeable future, with Mike Breen, Tony Brosnan, Diarmuid O’Connor, Ruairi Murphy and Stefan Okunbor unavailable through injury, with Breen and Murphy in the “medium to long-term” bracket according to their manager.

Paul Geaney – whose wife gave birth this week – and Tadhg Morley – who got married recently – are both unavailable for the Derry game.

Kerry’s opening game against Derry brings O’Connor face to face once more with Mickey Harte, which will surely stoke passions amongst the Kingdom’s faithful on Saturday night, but the Dromid native feels Kerry go into this year’s campaign much better placed that 12 months ago.

“I just thought that for a lot of last year we were chasing our tail because we were late back and we didn’t start training until New Year’s Day more or less. We just started the year badly and while we made up a good bit of ground in the middle of the year I still don’t think we were anywhere near where we were the year before, in the sense that you know you’re going well when you’re kind of in control of your season. When you’re able to rest players and move players around.

“We found we were having to go flat out to win three National League games and stay up, whereas… we had three do or die League games that we had to win to stay up, you don’t like being in that position, really.

“I just felt we never kind of completely in control of our season last year, I thought we were chasing our tail for a lot of it.”

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