The Kerryman (South Kerry Edition)
New manager is going to have to make some hard calls to cut panel
EAMONN Fitzmaurice and his management team probably aren’t going to be the only departures from the Kerry senior football set-up with more than one of the current squad of players certain to consider their futures in the green and gold. The hurt of the team’s earlier than usual exit from the All-Ireland series might well be still too raw for anyone to be wondering what lies ahead - and certainly any of those older players should be given plenty of time and space for reflection - but with a new management team to be put in position before the end of October, one presumes, those players might well have to fast-track their decision.
This will probably be the first year in quite some time where players won’t be afforded that extended winter break from the inter-county regime, unless they are on club championship duty. Whoever takes over from Fitzmaurice will, one imagines, want to have a pretty clear idea of who’s with him and who’s not before Christmas. And while senior players should be allowed to make that call for themselves it will, of course, ultimately come down to the new manager who he wants in and who he wants out.
One charge - right or wrong - levelled at Fitzmaurice this year was that he held on to too many of the older group of players, with that argument being backed up in the end that may of those players in the 30-plus age bracket not making a real difference when the Super 8s boiled down to the meaningful stuff. After the 2017 season Bryan Sheehan and Jonathan Lyne were the only two established panellists that didn’t return for 2018 (Johnny Buckley removed himself from the squad due to personal reasons). The argument has been made all summer that players such as Donnchadh Walsh, Darran O’Sullivan and Anthony Maher didn’t have a huge amount left to offer, while a few others such as Mikey Geaney, Barry John Keane and Fionn Fitzgerald have been around the fringes of making the first fifteen but just haven’t been able to establish themselves in the top bracket.
Of course, only 15 can start and 21 be used on any given day, and with the Super 8s offering up two extra games in a fairly condensed time-frame the counter-argument was that Fitzmaurice needed to expand his panel of players, not reduce it.
When Brian Cuthbert took over as Cork team manager a few years back it could be said he took too heavy a hand with the pruning shears, and by the time he had culled players like Graham Canty, Anthony Lynch, Noel O’Leary and Pearse O’Neill that he was left with a dressing room full of youth but devoid of experience. With so many young players set to come into the senior panel this year it was understandable, then, that Fitzmaurice wanted to keep a few old head around the place, even if in his heart of hearts he didn’t think they’d be the ones to carry Kerry deep into the Championship this year.
Whether or not Fitzmaurice should be accused of blind loyalty to a core group of players who played a huge part in the 2014 All-Ireland title success is a moot point now; the next man in will hardly have such devotion to any of the current squad.
If Diarmuid Murphy is to get the gig he will have worked with several of the players that will be around next year like David Moran, Shane Enright, Peter Crowley, James O’Donoghue and his own club mate Paul Geaney. Yet Murphy has never struck us as the sentimental type, and his pragmatic way would suggest that no one would be spared the axe, now even the growing contingent of Dingle players on the panel.
Jack O’Connor is another potential successor to Fitzmaurice not known for his sentimental ways, and while the Dromid man has always been fiercely protective of any and every player under his charge he would also be brutally efficient in conducting a cull if he felt that was the way to go.
Indeed, O’Connor would probably be more interested in bringing through some more of the Minor players from the 2014 and 2015 teams he managed, which is presumably what Peter Keane would do also.
It’s not inconceivable that Walsh, O’Sullivan, Maher, Donaghy and even Killian Young could step away over the winter, if based on nothing else but for advancing years (coupled with the huge amount of football they have played), while any new manager will surely have to take a cold, critical look at that other bracket of players who still have age on their side but are now looking to be caught in limbo on the panel. Keane, Fitzgerald and Mikey Geaney have to fall into that category as well as Mark Griffin, unless he can be reinvented as something other than a square defender in a round full back line.
There’s no doubt that whatever else can be levelled at Fitzmaurice this year he has infused a fine nucleas of youth into the panel and team, and in three or four years that will remain his legacy. That infusion came too late to save him, but the next man in will already have a young but strong foundation to build upon. Who he puts on top of that could, as ever, be the difference between success and failure, between the clap on the back and the kick in the arse.