Champs down but far from out

THE higher you go the harder the fall, so it goes without saying that Dr Crokes defeat to Nemo Rangers in the Munster Club Championship Final - a result that strips the Kerry county champions of their provincial and All-Ireland Club titles - will seriously hurt the Killarney club and its players. We’ve said it here before, but it’s worth repeating: it takes a great club and team to win the Andy Merrigan Cup; it takes an exceptional team to retain it. This Dr Crokes team will have truly believed they could have joined an elite group of four teams - UCD, St Finbarrs and Crossmaglen Rangers twice - to have successfully defended the All-Ireland Club SFC title.

Having come up short in that quest doesn’t diminish in any way what this Dr Crokes team has achieved over the last 18 months, but such are the exacting standards this group sets for itself - led in that regard by manager Pat O’Shea - that this defeat and the end of the journey (for now) will cut deep. The pain of defeat cut deep into many of the Crokes’ players and management’s faces in Pairc Ui Rinn on Sunday afternoon as Aidan O’Reilly accepted the silverware that belonged to Johnny Buckley twelve months ago.

What will hurt most, probably, is the sense that while Nemo were very good, the Crokes players - with few exceptions, underperformed. Knowing that there was more in you, individually and collectively, but it didn’t come out for whatever reason always grates the most with players. Management, too, will always second guess themselves afterwards, and the Crokes mentors will wonder what if they had made this switch sooner or that substitution earlier.

It can’t be overstated just how good Nemo were. There’s always propensity for teams playing Dr Crokes to look at names like Buckley, Casey, O’Leary and, of course, Cooper on the team sheet and be spooked by them. Or at least allow one’s own game plan to be dictated by the household names on the Crokes team. Not so Nemo. They obviously looked at Dr Crokes, sensed a vulnerability in their defence, and went for the jugular. With forwards of the calibre of Paul Kerrigan, Luke Connolly, Barry O’Driscoll and the lesser known Paddy Gumley, the Cork champions backed themselves to press high and take on the Crokes defence. It worked to near perfection, except for a failure to convert any of five or six decent goal chances they created in the first half alone.

In a similar vein, Nemo backed their backs to do their job fairly much in isolation, without the need for a blatant sweeper or a blanket defence. Between putting adequate pressure on the Crokes kickers outfield and the inside forwards, Cooper, O’Leary et al cut isolated and frustrated figures all through.

It was, in many respects, a masterclass in positivity, discipline and skill from the Cork team, as Dr Crokes selector Harry O’Neill could concede.

“In fairness to Nemo they have a good game-plan, good players and they stuck to it. We just didn’t live with it,” he said. “We felt that we did the right things, we felt we were fresh. (The players) actually looked very fresh during the week and we felt we were in a good place coming in here today. It just didn’t happen and sometimes like today when a team like Nemo gets the upper hand on you and you’re chasing the game all the time, it makes it difficult to find stuff in your legs. If you have the ball it’s a lot easier and I think for long periods of the game Nemo were winning a lot of the battles

so they had more of the ball and we were chasing it and legs do get a lot heavier and weary. We didn’t have the ball and we didn’t control and didn’t dictate times of the game where we could have picked off a few scores.

“You’re always looking to have your top players to have big games, and we didn’t win enough battles today and we didn’t have enough guys that we can turn around and say that they all played well. If they did and we were beaten by Nemo, well... Nemo were the better team, let’s not take anything away from that, but we’d be disappointed that we played below par.”

O’Neill has consistently said that in some respects the hardest part of the journey for clubs coming out of Kerry has been precisely that part of the journey: winning the Kerry county championship. Obviously the next part of the puzzle is just as hard, if not harder, given that Dr Crokes All-Ireland victory last March was the first for a Kerry club since Laune Rangers did it 21 years ago. But we get what O’Neill means. You can’t have a crack off the Munster and All-Ireland Club Championships unless you come out of the Kingdom, and that is never easy in any given year, even for a team of the quality of this current Crokes one.

So what now for this particular group of Dr Crokes players? Arguably the most important part of the equation going forward to 2018 is keeping Pat O’Shea on board as manager and keeping the management team in place, with, perhaps, a tweak or two to freshen it up.

As for the players, this remains a predominantly young squad, with obvious exceptions. Servants like Eoin Brosnan and Ambrose O’Donovan are likely to step back further, if not retiring altogether, but they didn’t figure much on the starting team since the summer. Others like Luke Quinn, Michael Moloney and Alan O’Sullivan, who endured a tough day against Nemo, won’t be axed but will have their work cut out to hold their places in the face of young brilliant nascent talent coming through.

By next September’s county championship there could be five new players in the Crokes starting team. Those players could be Michael Potts and David Naughton in defence, Paul Clarke at midfield and Tony Brosnan and Jordan Kiely in the attack. Dr Crokes might be down this week, but in the long term, at least in Kerry, they are most certainly not out.