This Kerry team deserved a better and more suitable ending to the 2007 championship. They were the strongest and gutsiest, and easily the most focused football team in the entire country over the last five months. Their new manager was a calm and outstanding leader in what was for him, personally, a massively pressurised first year in charge.

And they played good football too. Kerry were very good and very solid all through, and when they needed to dig deep in the quarter-final test against Monaghan, Pat O'Shea's lads did him especially proud.

In all, O'Shea and his team are the most deserving of champions. Only Monaghan, in 2007, came really close to matching Kerry's undoubted qualities as a team.

After that, in truth, there was nobody.

Therefore, it also has to be stated, this morning, what a rat's ass of an All Ireland senior football championship we have just paid good money to witness. In Ulster, despite being riddled with injuries and injustices week after week, Tyrone miraculously came out on top . . . not that that says very much about the other members of the much proclaimed toughest and proudest provincial championship in the land.

In Leinster, Dublin stayed on top without getting into a great sweat, and Meath showed signs of life, but after that we're already happy to forget low grade football right across the board. In Connacht there was no sign of Roscommon, Mayo or Galway coming out to play serious football with their friends. And that left Kerry and Cork, in the south . . . and we have just seen up close what each of these teams are honestly made of. Steel in Kerry's case, but Cork, even after three years hard at work under Billy Morgan, are made up of a much more pliable substance.

It would have been better for everybody last Sunday, and especially the Kerry team and its supporters, if those three ridiculous goals had never happened. Kerry would still have won by the five or six or seven points we all had forecast, and this team which I have wondered about in the recent past, and still wonder about today, could have walked away from Croke Park tall and proud.

I actually felt a little sorry for Kerry on this occasion. After two utterly forgettable All Ireland final victories with Jack O'Connor, the team comes to Croker with a new man on the sideline, to meet their greatest adversaries in one of the most tempting of deciders of the last quarter or half a century, and we get the antics and general bungling normally featured in one of the mini-games played out between Croker's mini-goalposts.

None of that was Kerry's fault. The champions were way below par and never looked like living up to the great occasion themselves in the first 35 minutes . . . and the only 35 minutes . . . of the contest. But, certainly, Kerry were ready to up their performance, and looked mentally prepared to go toe-totoe with whoever or whatever appeared in front of them. You sensed that they had enough men on the field who were ready to become heroes.

And, none more so that someone whom I have, over the last two months, singled out as possibly not being of county material. Seamus Scanlon is the latest in a long line of footballers who have appeared alongside Darragh O Se and perished . . . for whatever number of reasons. Fifteen midfielders, I'm informed, have come and gone in Darragh's lifetime.

Last Sunday, however, it was young Scanlon who settled down first to the business at hand, and who thereby did more than anybody else on the field . . . bar Aidan O'Mahony, possibly, who was also exemplary and quite magnificent . . . to help settle a very nervy and over-reaching Kerry team.

To Seamus Scanlon, I offer my unreserved apologies. He was terrific in that faulty opening 20 minutes, winning good ball, making himself available, and tackling hard. Scanlon, indeed, was doing the business even before Darragh O Se arrived on the scene last Sunday afternoon. O Se was okay last Sunday. Just okay. He contributed here and there, but there was nothing solid about his performance. And the Gooch, also, was well short of being fantastic. He scored one goal and five points, and good for him.

His goal was a dreadful act of folly by the Cork goalkeeper and his last three points were, for him, served up on a plate. Cooper is a great footballer, but it would be entirely idiotic for anybody to seriously put a value on his performance in this All Ireland final because he was never pressurised for long or asked, forcibly, to be magical. Getting into cheerleading hysterics about the Gooch, on this occasion, is really quite unnecessary.

This game of football probably let Colm Cooper down more than anyone else on the field. A man of his incredible quality needs to have it demanded of him, on the third Sunday in September, to offer up something much more substantial and sublime than just another training ground routine. That's all we saw from him. One flukey goal (the sort of goal he would have got away with any evening in Killarney, but which should have left him in need of an oxygen mask, at the very least, in an All Ireland final, if either the goalkeeper or the defender was doing his job properly), and an incredible miss with the goal gaping in front of him a couple of minutes later. After rounding one man, and slipping inside another, and then officially recording one of the worst shots of the year, Colm Cooper, ideally, needed to leave his special mark on the second half of the game.

Instead, all we got were a smattering of easy points which, even Seamus Moynihan, if he came down from the stand in his walking shoes, probably would have scored.

When Colm Cooper is older and greyer, and long retired, he'll want to look back on games 10 times bigger and more overpowering by their nature than the 2007 All Ireland football final, if he is to feel perfectly happy with himself.

Cooper, and this Kerry team, now needs a real test and some worthy opponents, if they are to discover just how good they can be in life. Ideally, one such opponent might pop their heads up in the air next year at a time when Kerry will be counting down to three-in-a-row of All Ireland titles.

We will have to wait, anxiously, through the winter months.

Dublin appear stuck . . . both the team and their manager, and it's hard to see either being a whole lot different in 2008. Tyrone have collided against a brick wall. Armagh have stopped, and have to start again. Galway have gone through the floorboards.

Mayo? God help us, who knows? Meath and Laois have bigger dreams than teams ready to live up to these dreams at this point in time. Go through the provinces, one by one, and it's fairly obvious, Gaelic football is in a troubled time. Monaghan, and only Monaghan in my book, have been steadily, brick by brick, building themselves up into a formidable team these last three years, and that's why I thought they had more than a decent chance of beating Kerry in the quarter-final. I thought Dublin would beat Kerry too, but, unfortunately, I was misguided. It happens to those of us who live in Dublin. Some of us have greater belief in Dublin than the Dublin team or team management have in themselves, seems to me.

It was Kerry's year alright, and I congratulate Pat O'Shea and his players. These lads, some of them still only kids and some of them still barely county men, could easily count out another two or three All Irelands before they call it quits.

If that starts happening, I would caution Gaelic football fans all over Ireland, including Kerry men and women, to keep their heads.

One member of the greatest Kerry team of all time, at the start of this week, announced that this Kerry team was destined to share the same stage as himself and his illustrious teammates. Honestly and truly, this sort of old guff has no place in any serious analysis of modern day Gaelic football.