Highs and lows in Leinster

IT all started with such high hopes.

A place in the Leinster championship proper felt achingly within reach for the Kingdom. All they had to do was beat two teams ranked below them in the league. They didn’t even have to defeat Offaly – a team they beat in the final round of the league a few weeks before – to ensure passage.

As a matter of fact people went as far as to speculate that, really, it would be preferable if they didn’t top the round robin stage as the team who topped it would have to face Galway.

Second place and the chance to play Laois for a place in the Leinster semi-finals – probably at Croke Park – was deemed by most to be a far more attractive proposition. If that all sounds a little bit like hubris then that’s fair enough.

We hasten to add that was the hubris of fans and pundits and not of the players or their management team. Still it has to be something of a disappointment that Kerry didn’t manage to get out of this group given how well they’d been playing before it.

The quality of Kerry’s hurling in the relegation play-off victory over Laois raised hopes far too high, we now see that. The old adage that league is league and championship is championship has never been more apt.

As a matter of fact such was the intensity required of Kerry to maintain their status as a Division 1 county that it’s not altogether surprising that, in hindsight, they were a little flat going into their first ever campaign in the Leinster hurling championship.

The Kingdom won their opening game against Carlow comfortably enough 2-19 to 0-17, but it wasn’t a performance either they or their management team would have been happy with. This Kerry team was capable of more.

Carlow left Austin Stack Park kicking themselves that they didn’t do more damage in a first half they dominated. They squandered thirteen scoring chances and left Kerry in at half-time with a two point lead.

It was a warning Kerry needed. Alas it was one they either didn’t or couldn’t heed. Westmeath were next up in Austin Stack Park fresh from a fourteen point victory over Offaly.

Even so many people felt that, on home ground, Kerry would have the wherewithal to win the game. That, of course, is not how it turned out. Westmeath were tuned-in in a way that Kerry simply were not. The Lake County ran out five point winners – 1-18 to 1-13 – and all of a sudden Kerry’s hopes and dreams of a Leinster quarter-final looked very shaky indeed. Especially when you consider that they had to travel to Offaly for the final game and do so without Mikey Boyle (pictured) who got himself sent off for a challenge on Conor Shaw. The Kerry faithful travelled to Tullamore more in hope than in expectation, but to give them their dues gave former manager Eamonn Kelly’s side a real game of it. Unfortunately, however, Kerry lacked a real killer instinct in the game – unsurprising considering Boyle’s absence – and while Shane Nolan led the line admirably Kerry had to give second best 3-19 to 0-20, bringing their second to a close.