Short-list is announced
FRIDAY night week brings together the best footballers from the 2017 East Kerry Senior Football Championship O’Donoghue Cup when the All Star Team of the Championship will be announced. This year sees the eighth East Kerry GAA All Star team being selected is what is now a well established, widely recognised and hugely coveted honours ceremony, which rewards the best individual performances of that year’s O’Donoghue Cup.
The East Kerry Championship just past, which saw Rathmore retain the Dr Paddy O’Donoghue Memorial Cup for a third time and make it a remarkable four-in-a-row of titles for the club, was another keenly contested and competitive competition, culminating in Rathmore’s one-point win over Legion is a terrific final in Fitzgerald Stadium.
It must be said that two unfulfilled fixtures - Firies failing to field against Legion in the quarter-final, and then Dr Crokes not playing Legion in the semi-final - skewed the balance of the Championship in 2017, not least for the fact that Legion ended up in the final without playing a match to get there. It was a far from ideal scenario but it certainly made for a more interesting All Star team selection debate. It’s usual that the O’Donoghue Cup finalists command the majority of places on the All Star team, if only because they’ve normally played the most games in getting there. It was, therefore, quite unprecedented to be judging one team of finalists on the basis of just one game, the same as those teams that exited the Championship at the preliminary round or quarter-final phase, also having played just one match.
If nothing else, that has made for short-list of 24 nominations drawn from a wider number of clubs - nine clubs are represented on the short-list - and time will tell how that might impact on the final All Star team. Once again, the judging panel came to the selection process well-informed, open-minded and dedicated to picking the best representative team of the 2017 O’Donoghue Cup. Strong cases were made, hard calls were made and in the end the judges agreed on an All Star team that will stand the test of time and stand as an equal to any of those that have gone before it all the way back to 2010.
The short-list of 24 contains the usual mix of established names and nascent