Dr Crokes kings of the Kingdom for the sixth time in eight years

IT’S a week when the Dr Crokes management will really earn their corn and it won’t have a lot to do with a football in hand. Between last Sunday’s county final win and next Sunday’s Munster Club Championship quarter-final away to Clonmel Commercials it’s all about managing. Players managing their bruised and tired bodies, and management bringing the emotions of winning the county title down before cranking them up again to peak for what will be a testing visit to south Tipperary.

Crokes report no injury fallout from last Sunday’s bruising encounter with South Kerry other than the customary “knocks and bumps and sore bodies” as selector Harry O’Neill describes them. That in turn lends itself to the usual selection headache for the management team. Colm Cooper has shaken off the hamstring issue that led to a precautionary withdrawal from the starting team last weekend, but what management team isn’t going to start a fit Cooper? His replacement Tony Brosnan scored two points and was well involved in general play. Kieran O’Leary, Daithi Casey and Micheal Burns are undroppable right now so could Gavin O’Shea or Brian Looney give way to keep Brosnan in the team? Bittersweet problems to have.

Crokes start the defence of their provincial title against Tipperary champions Clonmel Commercials, a club that has won three of the last six Tipp county titles. They boast a sprinkling of familiar and talented footballers, none more so than Michael Quinlivan (pictured below), the golden boy of Tipperary football right now. Throw in Jason Lonergan, Ian Fahey and Jack and Seamus Kennedy and they have a strong core of players, a few of whom are dual players and bring that bit of hurling hardiness to their game.

The had seven points to spare over Killenaule in the county final a fortnight ago and Dr Crokes will know from a previous excursion to the Premier county, when a Liam Kearns Aherlow almost beat them, that south Tipperary is football country fraught with danger for interlopers, even if they’re All-Ireland Club champions. Indeed, it’s just two years since Clonmel Commercials beat Nemo Rangers to claim the Munster

Club title and they really should have taken down Dublin champions Ballyboden St Endas next time out to make the 2016 All-Ireland final.

“The timing and the venue makes it a very tricky fixture,” O’Neill said on Tuesday, confirming a clean bill of health from the Crokes camp. “I’ve al- ways said it about these matches. You’re playing county champions. You’re playing the best team in a county every time you go out, so every team is where they are on merit. They probably should have got to the All-Ireland final last year (2016). We know about Quinlivan and Lonergan and the Kennedys, and I’d know about a few of the younger lads who were with Clonmel High School in the Colleges football.

“We had to celebrate winning a county final and we did that on Sunday night. We enjoyed ourselves, and now this week is about getting the bodies right and then looking at the opposition and arriving there on Sunday in the best possible shape. It’ll be a pool session tonight (Tuesday) a bit of light pitch work on Thursday maybe, just to get back on the grass, and the management will see what we can dig up on Clonmel and do our usual analysis,” O’Neill said of the week ahead for the champions.

Reflecting further on last Sunday’s performance O’Neill said he was pleased with the efficiency of the team in terms of taking their scoring chances, but would be a little concerned about the turnover of possession to South Kerry and the chances afforded to the opposition.

“The key issue for me would be the turnover of possession too often and just giving the ball up soft. We need to be more confident on the ball and stronger with it. We created a couple of goal chances, which we didn’t execute against South Kerry but we’d hope to take at least one of those on another day. We struggled at times to get enough of ball into our inside forward like Kieran O’Leary and Tony Brosnan so that’s another area to focus on.”

The easy thing to say is that Dr Crokes are Munster and All-Ireland champions and based on recent form in the county championship there’s no reason to believe they will come away from Clonmel with anything other than a win. But some of these road trips in Munster have been thorny games for Crokes to successfully negotiate - Aherlow taking them to extra-time in 2010 and a couple of tough and tight games in Quilty against Kilmurry-Ibrickane. Crokes did have 11 points to spare over Clonmel in 2012 but that was in Lewis Road and enough of time has passed to render that result fairly meaningless. Right now the Munster champions would gladly come away from the Golden Vale with a one-point win. Expect them to have a few more than to spare.