Peter Keane felt Kerry's ability to contain Galway's big players was central to their All-Ireland MFC final triumph.

Speaking after guiding the Kingdom to their third Tom Markham Cup in-a-row, the manager revealed: "We put a lot of work into our match-ups. Their two big guys were Evan Murphy and Robert Finnerty, and both got substituted.

"Our defence was excellent today. David Naughten was superb, Michael Potts was superb, Dan O'Brien worked very hard and Micheal Foley did well. We conceded three goals against Cork and we were very conscious of that.

"We didn't want to concede anymore against Derry and the next thing we conceded two, which we weren't happy with. We went out with a definite plan agianst Kildare and it was the same today. Goals win games. We didn't concede any and we got three."

He added: "We always knew it was going to be exceptionally tough. There were fellas I knew saying this was going to be a stroll because of the scores we'd been kicking all year - far from it. From the way we had seen Galway set up against Donegal, we knew there wasn't going to be a whole pile of space.

"We knew they were going to be targeting our full forward and half forward lines with the scores they had been kicking. To keep us to 10 scores overall was a credit to them."

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