There’s an understandable trend in football (same in NFL btw) that the closer you get to the business end of the season, the more referees turn a blind eye to aggressive play. Basically red card offences become yellow card offences, black card offences tends to become yellow card offences, or ignored completely.
I don’t mind this approach myself. Gaelic football is at its heart a physical sport, and I’ve no interest in watching a freetaking contest to decide the destiny of Sam. The winners should have a bit of mettle and then some.
And because (us nordies especially) we only really start to analyse Kerry at the latter end of a championship, it does on occasion seem like they have a different set of rules. They don’t. Not Kerry per se. The last eight, last four and last two have an incrementally different set of rules.
We just see more of Kerry and Dublin at these stages than anyone else, playing more often by the “bigger boy” rules. And for some observers, it manifests in paranoia.