East break through

IT’S hard not to look at it as something epochal, a changing of the guard, the end of one era and the beginning of another. Maybe that’s to put too fine a point on it, but at the end of a decade one tends to look at things on a grander rather than a granular scale.

Dr Crokes were going for their eighth county championship title in ten years. East Kerry for their first in twenty years. If you wanted you could frame it as a scrappy insurgency against the old order, but that certainly would be to over-egg the pudding.

Whatever East Kerry may be they’re no underdogs, even if the Crokes were a lot of people’s favourites for the game, if only on the basis of what they’d done before, on the basis of a history-making seven times in nine years.

When it came down to it though they couldn’t hold back the tide of history and to give the Lewis Road men their dues try they did, mightily so for a lot of the time, until such time as it was clear which way the wind was blowing.

Certainly there were signs of it in the first half when Dr Crokes struggled to break down a ravenously hungry East Kerry side who hunted in packs and who were led brilliantly in attack by Paudie Clifford.

At half-time East Kerry were three points clear – 0-8 to 0-5 – and it was looking pretty good for them. The pendulum seemed to have swung the other way when Pa Warren picked up a second yellow card for East Kerry early in the second half, but then the boy wonder of Kerry football David Clifford jimmied up a piece of magic to all but seal the title for the East.

His goal – coupled with the dismissal of Mark O’Shea in the direct aftermath of it – put East Kerry in the box-seat and soon had a second goal for Darragh Roche (assist Clifford). Game over. Crokes did fight back with Gavin White scoring a consolation goal but that’s all it was.

“It’s brilliant to win the Bishop Moynihan Cup again. I’m thrilled to be quite honest about it,” East Kerry boss Jerry O’Sullivan enthused.

Having been on the panel for the East Kerry three in a row at the end of the nineties he knows just what it means. A new era has begun.