January football
F you weren’t in Mallow last then you could, possibly, have missed your chance. Your chance to see Kerry and Cork’s senior footballers go head to head in 2017, that is. Yes, last Sunday’s tepid joust in what was essentially a McGrath Cup semi-final could well be the only time these two great rivals encounter each other this year.
Cork, of course, will play Division 2 football in the National League, having been relegated last season, so that puts an end to the long-standing spring meeting of the counties. Beyond that there are no guarantees anymore. The Munster Championship won’t bring Kerry and Cork together until the final in early July, but given what happened last year there is no certainty that will happen. Given that Tipperary derailed Cork’s Munster Championship run last year and the counties are expected to meet in the semi-final again this year, we might have already seen the first and only meeting of Munster’s ‘big two’ for 2017.
Quite what we learned from the fixture in Mallow is unclear. It’s obvious that January football is about as far as you’ll get from August and September football, so trying to sketch any lines from here to there is a facile exercise. A much nearer out-post is the early rounds of the National League, but even then can anyone foresee how Kerry will do against Donegal in Letterkenny in a couple of weeks, or, for that matter, how Peadar Healy’s Cork team will fare away to Galway on February 5, based on what – and who – we saw in Mallow last weekend?
Clearly it hasn’t mattered much to Kerry how they have done in the League in the last few years. In Fitzmaurice’s first couple of years in charge Kerry stared relegation from Division 1 in the face before surviving by the skin of their teeth.
It hardly did them any harm in the ensuing Championship. In 2014, for example, Kerry finished sixth of eight teams in Division 1– ahead of Kildare and Westmeath – but went on to win the All-Ireland title later that year. Incidentally, Kerry’s September opponent that year, Donegal, plied their football in Division 2 earlier that spring, winning promotion back to the top flight.
Furthermore, the team that topped Division 1 after the seven-game regular season was Cork; roundly beaten by Kerry in the Munster Final and then going out in the All-Ireland quarter-finals.
The point here is that if the League would appear to have little bearing on the Champion-