The Kerryman (South Kerry Edition)
Cork might be down but they’re never out
In the build-up to Sunday week’s Munster SFC Final Paul Brennan suggests that Cork’s record in Killarney means the visitors won’t be too far away from the champions
REMEMBER way back when the Dublin footballers were on that unbeaten streak? Thirty-something games it was and it seemed as if it would never end. Well, it did you know.
In March the Dubs surpassed the previous longest unbeaten League / Championship run set by Kerry when players wore cloth caps and spectators cycled to games. By early April the hot streak was over, undone by – who else – Kerry in the League Final.
The Cork footballers are on a bit of a streak too. Not the type of record they will like reminding of, but it’s there nevertheless. It’s 21 summers since a Cork team won a Munster senior championship match in Killarney.
A cursory look at the state of the respective Kerry and Cork senior teams right now suggests that run will continue for a 22nd summer and beyond. But the thing is – as happened the Dubs a couple of months ago – all good (or bad) things must come to an end some time. Could this be the year Cork end their cold streak in Kerry?
We were, of course, all meant to be heading to Cork in a fortnight for the Munster Final. It was always going to be a close run thing: having the re-developed Pairc Uí Chaoimh ready for July 2.
The expectation was that the smell of fresh paint would greet a capacity crowd in the new stadium on Munster Football Final day, but that is now not the case. A delay in applying the finishing touches, and an unwillingness (correctly) on the part of Cork GAA to compromise health and safety to rush the opening, means Fitzgerald Stadium will host a third consecutive Kerry versus Cork Munster Championship meeting.
The conventional wisdom is that whatever chance Cork had of beating – or even being competitive – Kerry in Cork, Peadar Healy’s team has scant hope of upsetting a team going for its fourth successive provincial title. Right? Not so fast.
First of all, a completely new Pairc Uí Chaoimh wouldn’t exactly be ‘home’ for a Cork team that would be seeing it for the first time, the same as the Kerry team. Save for possibly one or two walkabouts on the pitch in the week before the game, the new Pairc Uí Chaoimh would surely have been as eye-opening and wondrous for the Cork players on July 2 as it would have been for the rest of us.
Every pitch and stadium has its nuances. Every surface, smooth and all as it might appear from a distance, has its hills and hollows and unique dimensions and grip. Players know these idiosyncrasies, it’s why ‘home advantage’ counts for something, however small, in inter-county football and hurling.
Racing out into a completely new stadium, onto a totally unfamiliar surface, would have taken away pretty much all that ‘home’ advantage for the Cork footballers had next month’s final made it to Leeside. Indeed, one could say that quite a majority of these Cork footballers will feel more at ‘home’ in Fitzgerald Stadium for a Championship match than anywhere else.
Were Cork to gain an advantage in Cork it would, you’d assume, be from the crowd, which, you’d expect, would be in the majority in Pairc Uí Chaoimh. You sure about that? There’s little doubt that had the new stadium been ready for the final that it would be a 45,000 sell-out. But how much would that be down to the promise of a cracking contest and how much down to a curiosity to simply see the new place?
We dare say that if next month’s fixture was going ahead in the old Pairc Uí Chaoimh the Munster Council would do magnificently well to get 30,000 through the turnstiles.
Throw in a wet, miserable day weather-wise and you could reasonably knock another 5,000 of a ‘walk up’ off that number. The public support for the Cork footballers can be fickle enough at the best of times; the prospect of seeing the spots knocked off their team by Kerry in a provincial final will hardly convince the floating supporter to travel on July 2, whether it be to the city or Killarney. That said, it’s probable that more Rebel supporters will cross the county bounds than would have gone to Ballintemple, at least before the old bowl was razed and rebuilt.
So, if we’ve established that ‘home’ advantage wouldn’t be an advantage at all for Cork this year, have they really any hope of ending their 22 years and counting famine for a Championship win on Kerry soil?
After scratchy performances and almost flattering one-point wins over Waterford and Tipperary thus far in the Championship it doesn’t bode well for Cork. By any measure against other Cork teams of the last 20 years, this is a poor Cork side. Or at least they are playing and performing poorly.
For the first time ever the county’s top two ranking in the province is under serious threat. As for being genuine All-Ireland contenders, forget about it. And yet, few things bring the best out in Cork teams than a Munster Final in Killarney.
Since 1995 – Cork’s last victory in Kerry – the counties have played 23 times in the Munster Championship. Kerry have won just over half (52.2%) of those, with 12 wins. Cork have won six (26.1%) and there have been five draws (21.7%). Somewhat significantly, perhaps, is that all five draws have been in Fitzgerald Stadium.
The most recent was 2015 when it took a somewhat speculative last minute Fionn Fitzgerald punt to rescue a draw for the home side. Before that Cork took a draw out of Killarney in 2010, 2009, 2006 and 2002.
In the 2015 replay, on a wet Saturday evening back in Killarney, six days after Fitzgerald’s sucker-punch equaliser, Cork lost by five points. It was their second biggest defeat in Killarney in 20 years. You got to go back to 2004 for a wider margin of defeat (8 points) and 2000 for another fivepoint defeat.
Since that 0-15 to 0-7 loss to Kerry in 2004, Cork’s record in Killarney reads: 2006 (draw), 2007 (lost by 0-2), 2009 (draw), 2010 (draw), 2011 (lost by 0-3), 2013 (lost by 0-2), 2015 (draw) and 2015 (lost by 0-5). The point is that Cork haven’t taken a heavy beaten from Kerry in Kerry in years.
The form lines coming into next month’s Munster Final all point to an easy Kerry win and if the game was played on the dark side of the moon there’s no getting away from the fact that Kerry are expected to comfortably defend their title.
But whatever pressure of expectation there would have been on the Cork footballers to christen their new stadium with a win has been taken away from them. They come to Killarney with absolutely no expectation on them.
They have, almost literally, nothing to lose. They should, at the very least, play with some abandon that evidently wasn’t there in their games against Waterford and Tipperary. Fear, as much as anything else, seemed to grip Cork in those two games, and if they come to Killarney in the same frame of mind they will get scorched. They can’t, of course, come with no method or apprehension but they must bring some of the swagger and spikiness and threat that Cork teams of old always brought to Killarney. If they do that they will always have a chance of winning.
Cork football is, no doubt, at a low ebb right now. It’s often the case that when the county’s hurlers are on the up the footballers are going in the opposite direction, and vice-versa. The hurlers are on the up but it’s only this season that they’ve bucked themselves up and shook themselves out of their own doldrums. It would serve the footballers well to do the same. To take a leaf from Kieran Kingston’s hurlers and approach their business with confidence and belief and a bit of Cork je ne sais quoi.
Those qualities alone won’t make this Cork team any less the underdog than it already is in advance of its July 2 visit to Killarney. But it would give them a solid base camp from which to launch a bid to scale Everest.
With Cork operating in Division 2 this year it means it’s April 2016 since the counties played each other competitively (discounting last January’s McGrath Cup game). If familiarity breeds contempt then the recent absence of meetings might breed something different. What that is, we can’t be quite sure of. Either way, Kerry need to be as wary as ever of a Rebel ambush.