Fitzmaurice thrilled with direct route
KERRY manager Éamonn Fitzmaurice insisted it wasn’t about records as his team trounced Cork by the biggest winning margin in 80 years of Championship to seal a sixth Munster title in a row.
Kerry haven’t put this string of titles together since 1975-80, a time when they had the football world at their feet. And the devastating nature of this victory will have many wondering if there is a team now equipped to derail Dublin’s four-in-a-row bid.
‘The big thing with the Munster Championship, you want to win the Munster Championship, it’s where we’re from,’ said Fitzmaurice.
‘Then it gives you the direct route to Croke Park, where you want to go. No, we haven’t been thinking about records. We’re just delighted to be where we are now.
‘Delighted to have won the Munster Championship, to have silverware on the table. And delighted that we have the straight route to the All-Ireland quarter-final series and the Super 8s and don’t have an extra game on the menu, that’s for sure.’
It turned into an embarrassment for the home side, despite rattling Kerry with two early goals. ‘In fairness to Cork, they came at us, as we knew they would. They got two goals early on and we were rocking a small bit but I think, to be fair to the players, they steadied the ship.
‘Once we got going then, we did what we wanted to do. We played quite well afterwards for most of the game, but there are still plenty of things we need to work on at the same time. ‘That’s a positive for us.’ Cork manager Ronan McCarthy admitted his players were ‘shellshocked’ after the nature of the collapse. He now has a couple of weeks to lift his team before the qualifiers.
‘It’s a hugely disappointing result and performance from us. Look, we have to put it behind us very quickly because we’ve a very quick turnaround to the next game in two weeks’ time.
‘I’ll be honest, that’s one thing I didn’t see coming. Look, we’ll get on with it.
‘They’re probably a bit shellshocked. No one was saying that we expected to come out and win by 10 points against Tipp but we felt we would be competitive.
‘I thought our big problem was, Kerry obviously didn’t want us to run the ball out, blocked up the centre very well, worked very hard to stop us and we hadn’t enough people supporting the ball carrier when we came out with the ball. I think we were turned over 19 times in the first half. Some of it very cheap in contact, lost the ball. That was the most disappointing element of it for me.
‘I felt that our real strength is our running game, our support play. Kerry weren’t going to come out easy on all that.
‘But we lacked support so many times. Got turned over and they were straight through. We got disjointed. Big gap then between our full-forward line and our halfback line and midfield.
The two goals early on kept us just within touching distance at half-time. They could have been further ahead. Pushed on from there.’
I’ll be honest, that result is one thing I didn’t see coming