Manager Keane says repeat performance by Kerry won’t be acceptable in All-Ireland final

KERRY Junior team manager Jimmy Keane has said that while pleased with the win over Leitrim, a repeat of the performance won’t be good enough to beat Meath in the All-Ireland final.

Keane wasn’t overly displeased with how Kerry performed last Saturday in Limerick but the Brosna man did accept that it was a below par display by the Munster champions. Keane said it was important to simply get the win and advance to the All-Ireland final to defend the county’s title, but he said he and his players have plenty to work on and improve upon in advance of that meeting with Meath.

“Look, we are very happy with the result, we’re not very happy with the performance to be honest. It wouldn’t do, and it won’t do, in an All-Ireland final and we realise that. We were very flat out there for some reason and it’s something we’re going to have to work on between here and the final,” Keane said.

“Coming into the game maybe we were on a hiding to nothing. We couldn’t really win. If we won by a big score everyone would say, sure, we were up against nothing, and if we didn’t play well I think people would be knocking us as well,” he said, adding that it’s probable some of the players were a little complacent about taking on a depleted Leitrim team.

“At the end of the day all you can do is warn the players as much as you can, but obviously there must be a bit of complacency in a performance like that. They seemed to be flat and maybe they thought they didn’t have to put in a hard shift to win the game. We tried as much as we could to guard against that, unfortunately it seemed to reflect in the performance that there was that complacency in it.

“At half time we just said to be patient. I suppose it’s the total opposite to the [Munster final] in Cork. Both teams went out to attack each other but I suppose Leitrim came very defensive minded, and it was the first time as a team we came up against a defensive display like that. Credit to them, they were very good at it and it took us a long time to break it down on occasions, but not as much as you’d like. But credit to our boys, too, they did work hard at it. The big point at half time was to be patient and to keep plugging away.”

Leitrim scored a goal after three minutes, and over the course of the game they created two, perhaps, three really clear goal chances, including a first half shot that hit the Kerry post.

“That’s obviously a big concern. We’re going to have to work on that,” Keane said of the breaches of the Kerry rearguard. “We can’t leave ourselves as open as that in the final or we will be punished. It’s just the way they dragged us around the field, but I think there’s just a lot of stuff for us to work on. There’s no excuses, our performance was poor and we won’t make any excuses for it, we’ll just work hard on it to try and make it better.

“We’re still very happy because it’s the result that counts. We’re still were we want to be, in an All-Ireland. That’s what we set out at the start of the year. If you want to go into an All-Ireland final with a performance like that then we’ve plenty to work on. I think we’re in an ideal situation going in because we know that performance won’t do, we know we’re going to have to up it one hundred percent above in Croke Park or wherever it will be. We still have quality, we still kicked some good scores, maybe not as many as we’d have liked.”