Colin Sheridan: The night Kerry talisman David Clifford showed his mortal side

Genius, Baudelaire told us, is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.  Nothing like a French poet to nonchalantly define the indefinable, but, to be fair to the petit bard, he was on to something. 

For if nothing else separates the immortals from the rest of us, it is NOT their ability to do the hard things consistently well - that would just make them great - but their ability to do great things with a childlike joy and gay abandon. Exhibit A, Leo Messi. He plays football now like he did when he was a kid. He may work harder than everyone, he may not, but what endures is the audacity of everything he does and the regularity with which he does it.

By Baudelaire’s metric, one could also view Kerry’s David Clifford as a genius. His ability to make the sport of Gaelic football - often not the easiest on the eye - appear to be something akin to Grace Kelly in Rear Window, is otherworldly. This last decade we have witnessed arguably the greatest football team of all time in Dublin, yet they achieved what they did without one individual reaching anywhere his level of transcendent brilliance. 

The Brogans had their moments. Cluxton changed the game with his metronomic evolution. Kilkenny became the game's first great point guard, but nobody - even with a nod to the sporadic brilliance of Diarmuid Connolly - has come close to Clifford in terms of prolific output and the utter panache with which he delivers it. Maurice Fitz was an enigma. Maybe Peter Canavan and Gooch come close. This guy, though, with his size and athleticism and range of skills, well… he’s an alien.

Except one night he wasn’t. On a rainy night in Carlow last February, the genius was held scoreless from play in the Sigerson final between