Dingle’s lack of fire is quenched by ice cool Dr Crokes

Paul Brennan reflects on a county final that never really ignited as we thought it might, which suited the ice-cool champions who delivered another calculated performance

WE thought we might get fire but instead we got ice. We thought Dingle would throw the hammer after the hatchet, so to speak, and bring a bit of orchestrated mayhem to the game to try to unsettle Dr Crokes but it never really came to pass. Instead we got a chess game of a county final and a rather benign contest, with Dr Crokes, once they got out ahead after 10 minutes, able to by and large shape this final to their will.

We waited and waited for this final to explode – not in the way of the recent, eh, unpleasantness – but in the way one expects, or at least hopes, that a county final would, but like Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s seminal play, we waited and waited but it never came.

We thought that Dingle – 70 years as a club waiting for a county title and out to avenge an 11-point final defeat to Dr Crokes six years ago – would come with an energy and a controlled chaos that might unhinge a Dr Crokes team that has, a couple of times this campaign, looked vulnerable. But Dr Crokes have a way of paralysing teams just by putting themselves on the same pitch as them, and while it cannot be said that Dingle froze or were overawed by the opposition or the occasion, could any of the 6,028 in attendance say that it really looked at any stage over the hour that Dingle had this county title in both hands?

A big consensus felt pre-match that Dingle would need two, even three, goals if they were going to win. That they didn’t manage to raise on green flag says it all. The Dr Crokes defence has been terrible at times in this championship (exhibit A: last 15 minutes against O’Rahillys in Round 2) but last Sunday they went out with one main objective: to curtail or cut out Paul Geaney’s goal threat.

When they did that they were never going to relinquish their title, were they? Michael Moloney did the primary man marking job on Geaney but John Payne, Fionn Fitzgerald and even Gavin White were never much more than an arm’s length away either. Geaney got one goal-bound shot off in the whole game - a couple of minutes into the second half - but his Kerry team mate Shane Murphy was equal to it in the Crokes goal. Geaney had scored 9-12 coming into this final and Crokes were clearly intent on not seeing that total rise considerably. In the end, one point from the All Star forward will be considered a brilliant day’s work by the Crokes defence.

In the 33rd minute Geaney drew a wonderful save from Shane Murphy. Less than a minute later Matthew Flaherty’s point made it a one-point game, 0-8 to 0-7. From the Crokes restart the champions moved the ball down field until Kieran O’Leary got a shot away for a point but had it half blocked down. The ball looped harmlessly into the Dingle parallelogram, and who was on his own 21-metre line claim possession of the ball? Paul Geaney. It was a selfless piece of play by the full-forward but a wholly unnecessary one. One can only imagination the utter delight on the Crokes sideline when they say Paul Geaney playing de facto full-back, albeit only momentarily.

Contrast that with Dr Crokes who never had the need to ask Kieran O’Leary or David Shaw or Tony Brosnan to mop up loose ball in their own full-back line. Every Dr Crokes forward can and does drift back into defensive positions as the occasion arise, but there is always at least two outlets parked high up the field in attacking positions no matter what. Think back to that period in the middle of the first half when Dr Crokes were picking off those seven unanswered points. Every single Dingle player was in their own half and behind the ball at one stage, with the Dr Crokes defenders flicking the ball back and forth for up to a minute at a time and then still managing to