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Tuesday August 30th 2005 GOOCH COOPER is like a cartoon character that climbs up off the pages of a comic, swinging windmills. He's Wile E Coyote turned to flesh and bone. Trying to stop him is like chasing smoke, a mug's game. His feet are a blur, his hands quicker than a snake's strike. He's Gaelic football's great assassin, yet he looks about as menacing as Garfield. You picture him in a Kerry dressing-room as voices soar and studs clack out an edgy war-dance and all you see is a freckled kid blowing balloons with his gum and flicking through a wad of Pokemon cards. Gooch is a deception. People who don't know him tend to fear for him. He puts the heart cross-ways on every mother in Ireland. It's as if they're watching a deer graze by a busy motorway. Yet no man is more terrifying to defences. No-one less susceptible to fear. Imagine you're Niall Geary last Sunday. You've had three weeks to set your plan for Gooch. The whistle goes and Billy Morgan's mantra whistles through your head. "Concentrate. Take his space. Never lose him." For six minutes, your day is flawless. Nothing comes near your corner. Gooch is anonymous as a flagpole. Next thing, it all changes. He's lost you. You're running so hard, your lungs burn, but your feet are clumps of concrete. He's got the ball, a roar ignites, the umpire bends. What the hell happened here? "Concentrate." In the fifteenth minute, he does it again. Catch, turn, left foot, score. You heart is thumping. In the seventeenth minute, you see the pass coming. This time, you're with him. You're so close, you're breathing his air. He goes to shoot. Bingo, it's covered. Then Gooch just feints and swivels. Scores off his right foot. You feel like you've chased the wrong man for your wallet. You can see Billy on the line. Hands on hips. Staring. You know the thoughts now flooding his mind. He's protective, but he ain't stupid. Thirty seconds later, Gooch scores his fourth. It's like he's picking apples. There's a stoppage and Graham Canty calls you over. Kevin O'Dwyer joins the meeting. Good guys, saying decent things. The words crowd you with encouragement. But they're just petals on a grave. You see the flurry of activity, hear the voice of the announcer. Your suitcase is packed. As you walk off the field, you can see Billy - pained and sorry - waiting to console you. He hates this as much as you do. So you take his handshake, nod gently at his kindness. And you climb the steps of the stand where substitutes shrug sadly and pat your shoulders, as if to say there's nothing more you could have done short of smuggling a gun out in your shorts. And, before you're even sitting, you can see your replacement, Kieran O'Connor, hanging out of Gooch's shirt like he's on a fairground ride and the safety harness has slipped open. Bryan Sheehan kicks an easy free. And there's Gooch, standing, unmoved. Hands on hips. Man of the match before it's even half-time. And, still, he looks skinny and pale. Like a kid in a cinema, gaping at the screen. Hard to fathom exactly how he killed you. Maybe, the surprise is that we're still surprised. Look at the contenders for 'Footballer of the Year' and, truth is, there's no-one in the shake-up that wouldn't have been a short price back in June. Just as it didn't take Einstein to identify Kerry, Tyrone and Armagh as the heavy-hitters, Nostradamus wouldn't have been required to short-list Gooch, Stephen O'Neill and Steven McDonnell as the key weapons in their artillery. But O'Neill and McDonnell both have a hard, swarthy and street-wise presence about them. Gooch looks like he's mitching from school. Yet Sunday wasn't the first day he took ownership of a game and, barring calamitous injury, it won't be the last. His brilliance was worth the entrance fee. A good thing too. Because Kerry-Cork was never a genuine contest. Funny how hurling has come ablaze at the business-end of Championship while football settled into a sequence of slaughter. Armagh-Laois. Tyrone-Dublin. Kerry-Cork. Big boys just clearing their throats. And now it narrows towards a voyeur's paradise. Gooch taking the sun in a hotter place. Maybe Ryan McMenamin, gabby and rope-thin, in his ear and on his boot-laces. Or maybe Francie Bellew and the way he might look at you. Either way, football gets a defining final. Kerry against Ulster's finest. Gooch loose among the wolves. Immortality to the last one standing. Vincent Hogan Time Out

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