County JFC: Castle capable of taking title
With the Club Championships starting in 10 days, Paul Brennan kicks off our previews with a look at the County Junior Championship
AN inauspicious start to the County Junior Football Championship with last weekend’s two scheduled preliminary games being conceded as walkovers. Asdee and Knocknagoashel had their reasonss for conceding to Kilgarvan and Moyvane respectively, but the authorities will be hoping this isn’t a sign of things to come as a new format comes into play this year with a group phase feeding into two semi-finals and a final, all to be completed in a six-week period.
That will inevitably suit some clubs and teams more than others, but everyone has known the clarity of the dates and structure for some time so there can be no excuse for lack of preparation this year.
Four groups of four will send their group winner to the semi-finals, with the county final coming a week later on the weekend of May 5/6. With just two county league rounds completed before the club championship (round 2 is next weekend) there hasn’t been much competitive action for the teams to get themselves up to championship speed, although most will have been involved in District Board leagues through February and early March.
With regard to who will be topping their group, an awful lot depends on the fixtures, which gives each team a home game (and therefore an away game) and a game at a neutral venue, and it will be vital that those with genuine title winning ambitions are winning their home game and/or first round match.
For the draw four clubs were seeded based on performance in last year’s Championships, and in this competiton Castlegregory, Lispole, Tuosist and Renard were those four teams.
Group 1 pits 2017 beaten Castlegregory with Scartaglen, Tarbert and Sneem/Derrynane, and the west Kerry club and top seed get a tentative nod to come through a tough group.
Lispole and Cordal can be considered the stronger pair in Group 2, and the former, who won the 2016 Novice Shield title, can be slightly fancied to get out of this group, finalists
although they do travel to Cordal in the first round, which could see their semi-final hopes dashed before they get off the ground.
In all good ‘group phase’ championships there’s a ‘group of death’ and Group 3 might well be it here, with three north Kerry clubs and top seed Tuosist bundled together in what could be a very competitive mini-league. Beale get a cautious nod to top this group but expect all teams to take points off each other in this one, and Duagh or Tuosist could easily come through here.
Two south Kerry clubs and two north Kerry clubs make up Group 4 and it’s with no degree of confidence that Valentia get the vote to proceed. That’s based on that fact that in Brendan O’Sullivan they have the only Kerry senior in action (assuming Killian Young isn’t fit enough to play with Renard) and because they start off with a home game.
This is the fourth tier of club championship football in the county and while there will be a deficit in top quality football in some matches, it will be more than compensated for in endeavour, passion and excitement. With the change up in the structure of the club championships there is actually no further to go for the winner of this particular championship, in terms of a follow-on Munster campaign. The bottom placed team in each group will play on in the Novice Championship along with Asdee and Knocknagoshel from the preliminary round, and any other team, such as Clounmacon, if they so wish to enter a team.
Panel depth and player availability over an intense and condensed six-week period will be a major factor in which four teams come out of the groups and who can maintain their momentum over the following three weeks, which include a county league round before the championship semi-finals and finals the following two weekends.
With an open draw for the semi-finals it’s more difficult to suggest which two clubs will reach this Junior Championship final, let alone call an overall champion, but with our neck on the line we’ll go for Castlegregory, Lispole, Beale and Valentia to make the last four and for Castlegregory to go one better than last year’s final defeat.