Stephen seals it: Kerry see off Banner in Cusack Park
SPEAKING minutes after Kerry’s win over Clare last Sunday Stephen O’Brien was mentally preparing for a return to Pairc Ui Chaoimh, scene of a 0-24 to 0-12 win for Kerry when they last faced Cork by the Lee in 2014. O’Brien’s 66th minute goal in Ennis helped consolidate a Kerry win and set up a Munster Final with a Cork team O’Brien is very familiar with.
Events on Monday mean O’Brien will renew acquaintances with some old UCC team mates, not in the new Pairc Ui Chaoimh, but in the more familiar surrounds of Fitzgerald Stadium where a Cork senior team hasn’t won a Championship game in Killarney in 22 years. Talking with Leeside in mind, O’Brien was in no doubt that whatever about the gulf in class between the current teams, the Kerry Cork rivalry is still very much in place.
“(Cork are) going to respond, definitely, so we’re going to have to be ready for them,” O’Brien said. “The Kerry Under-21 teams I was a part of, Cork beat us in two Munster finals. We never beat them at minor, either, so it’s still a rivalry, without a doubt. We never played them last year, so it’s great to have the rivalry going again.
We know the quality of their players.” The Kenmare man, who scores 1-1 against Clare after coming on as a half-time substitute, knows about the Cork players as well as any Kerry player: he played in the UCC team with Ken O’Halloran, Jamie O’Sullivan, Tomás Clancy, Barry O’Driscoll and Mark Collins that won a Cork county championship title in 2011 and the Sigerson Cup in 2010.
With the Munster Final now scheduled for Killarney, O’Brien’s expectations for the July 2 meeting might - privately at least - be somewhat different, but he was, nevertheless, pleased with the examination Clare presented Kerry with and, more importantly, how Kerry came through that test.
“It was a brilliant test. You can’t beat a Championship test and that adversity we came through,” O’Brien said. “We were up against it at half-time; down a man, a level game, and we were against the wind in the second half.
“Nothing was said really. There’s nothing you can say, really, at half-time, except to up our performance, and the players kind of challenged ourselves to do that, and that’s what happened in the second half.
“I suppose we’ve been around the block a few times, as well, lads just used a bit of experience and guile we’ve built up over the years. You couldn’t have written a better script for us than having that adversity, because you can’t fake it. That only happens in the championship. It’s great that’s under our belts now for the next day.”
On the matter of his Kerry team mate Brendan O’Sullivan, who featured for the Juniors in the curtain-raiser in Ennis, O’Brien said the failed drugs test aas “unfortunate”. “We found out there just before we went to the [training] camp [in Meath]. It’s only a game at the end of the day. We felt for Brendan, because he’s a key member of our squad, a great man behind the scenes, a great character. There was a lot of talk about it, so we rallied around him. There wasn’t too much said about it within the camp.”