All-Ireland has to be Beaufort’s aim

Both Beaufort and Na Gaeil should be well capable of winning the All-Ireland Club Junior title, and the ball in is Beaufort’s court now, writes Paul Brennan

IT’S often said in sport that a measure of whether a competition is a sound one or not, and if a championship has been a good one or not, is if we can say that the best team won it. Of course, that’s a sort of impossible question because the team with the trophy at the end of any competition must surely, logically, be the best team, and conversely - if we’re to argue that the ‘best team’ didn’t win then logic must surely say that they weren’t, in fact, the best team. Which brings us to the County Premier Junior Football Championship and the inevitable: did the best team win the title?

Put it this way, the two best teams in the Championship contested last Sunday’s final and the winners, Beaufort, can justifiably lay claim to be the best team overall. They played five games, they won five games - two of them after titanic extra-time contests - and they drew on all their collective experience and individual talent to get them over the line in a couple of really tough games.

It must be said, however, that had Na Gaeil managed to come out on the right side of a truly brilliant final last Sunday - and with a small bit of better fortune they might well have - then the Tralee club could equally have laid claim to have been the best team winning the title. But winners write the history, and when all is said and done and recorded for posterity, there can be few arguments but Beaufort beat them all - playing some spell-binding football along the way - to be fully entitled to call themselves 2018 County Premier Junior champions.

Kerry U-20 manager Jack O’Connor was in Austin Stack Park on Sunday and we can assume Eamonn Fitzmaurice and/or the Kerry senior team selectors were also there. O’Connor will have been particularly interested in - and pleased with - the performances of Na Gaeil’s Stefan Okunbor and Diarmuid O’Connor, both of whom can be expected to feature prominently in the Kerry U-20 team this summer. Okunbor played with no.9 on his back but played most of the first half in the full back position, where it’s being mentioned in dispatches that the Na Gaeil man is most likely to play for the Under-20s. He moved further out-field last Sunday as the game went on, and both O’Connor and Fitzmaurice should be very excited about what they saw from Okunbor.

Likewise with Diarmuid O’Connor who at a distance cuts a similar figure to Sean O’Shea - tall, wiry, skilful and confident on the ball - and though he was playing Minor football last year, he could be very much on Fitzmaurice’s radar for next year if he shows up well for the Under-20s this year.

Whether or not the Kerry senior management saw potential on the Beaufort team is another matter, but Mike Breen, Liam Carey and Ronan Murphy have all done enough in this Championship - and have enough youth on their side - to at least be given a little thought by Fitzmaurice and his selectors. A big contribution to Mid Kerry in the County Championship in September

- as well as with their club in the Munster Club Championship before Christmas - could at least through them into the shop window and make it harder for the Kerry management to ignore them.

And that’s the thing about the new format of the club cham-

pionships this year: they have offered every player in the county a window of opportunity to get themselves noticed, first by the divisional team managers and then, possibly, by Kerry team managers, be it at U-20, Junior or Senior level.

Looking back over the Premier Junior Championship it’s fair to say that Churchill were the ‘bolter’ team, not only for coming out of a tough group but especially for taking Beaufort to extra-time in their semi-final only to lose out by a point.

That Churchill are playing Division 5 football and Beaufort are in the top division certainly proves that League status means nothing when it comes to Championship action.

Churchill had beaten Group favourites Ballydonoghue and drawn with Skellig Rangers before beating Listry and qualifying as group winners in the most dramatic circumstances. With the same points and scoring difference as Skellig Rangers - whom they’d drawn with - it came down to Churchill’s better total scored (by just two points) to qualify them. Cruel luck on the South Kerry club but the rules demand that all the Groups must produce a winner at the end of the three rounds and three weeks.

It was interesting, therefore, that Na Gaeil didn’t qualify for the semi-finals until a week after the other three because of the need to reschedule their group game with Finuge, which was originally abandoned because of the horrific injuries suffered by two Finuge players in an accidental collision. Rescheduling the game was absolutely the right thing to do, but there was then the possibility of a clash between the Kerry hurler’s McDonagh Cup opener against Carlow and the Premier Junior Final had Finuge been involved. That highlighted the absolute lack of any wriggle room in the Club Championship schedule and it’s something the fixtures makers need to address rather than leaving such an outcome to chance.

For Beaufort their immediate concerns is to pick up enough league points over the summer to retain their Division One status, before the Munster Club Junior Championship comes into focus and a trip to Tipp to play the Tipperary champions on November 11. That date seems an awful long way off now, but from this remove one would have to feel that a Division One team from Kerry should be winning provincial club honours at the very least. As for an All-Ireland Club title? Well, they’ll be one of the strongest Kerry teams to compete at this level...so no pressure lads!