Up and down month for Kerry

JANUARY and February have rarely been kind to Eamonn Fitzmaurice in the National Football League during his tenure as Kerry senior football manager.

More often than not Kerry have entered into the second half of the league campaign a little on the back foot. A trip to Letterkenny to take on a largely new look Donegal looked like the perfect opportunity for the Finuge man and his team to get their campaign off on the front foot and, with James O’Donoghue and Paul Geaney in scintillating form – a theme that would reassert itself later in the season – that’s exactly what they looked like doing. With just thirteen minutes of to go (not including injury time) the Kingdom held a well-earned and quite impressive nine point lead. By the end of the match, however, that advantage had dwindled to just a three point success – 2-17 to 1-17. That was a somewhat worrying fade out at the end, but the game was won, the points were in the bag, there were far more positives than negatives for the Kingdom.

Next up Mayo visited Austin Stack Park and again Kerry started the game in hugely impressive fashion. New comer Adrian Spillane (left) rattled the crossbar with, essentially, his first kick of the game and, while nobody had reason to be critical of the Templenoe man, that miss (if one can even call it a miss) was part of a wider trend in the first half of the game. Kerry missed chances they should really have taken and had they done so the game would have been wrapped up long before the end.

As it was Mayo came back strongly against Kerry in the second half with injuries to Killian Young and Paul Geaney costing Kerry valuable experience. On top of that Kerry’s discipline in defence deserted them allowing Cillian O’Connor to score nine of his side’s total from placed balls.

In the end May ran out two point winners – 1-10 to 0-15 – with Kerry again failing to score in the final fifteen minutes of the game.

All the same there were more positives than negatives for Kerry in the game. After a second home defeat a fortnight later to Monaghan that case was becoming harder to make. In a poor game of football, the Kingdom played poorly. Kerry coughed up two goals – both of them coming directly from turnovers in their own defence – despite playing a relatively conservative game plan.

It was still early days, plenty of time to turn things around as Fitzmaurice so often has.