Best 15 to win All-Ireland Club Intermediate title

LAST week we selected our Best 15 footballers who’ve won the All-Ireland Club Senior Football Championship with a Kerry side, and this week it’s the turn of the Intermediate Club Championship. Incepted for the 2003/04 season, there have been 17 All-Ireland IFC finals, with Kerry clubs winning six (just over 35%) of them. Given that is has taken 50 years for Kerry teams to win just six All-Ireland senior club titles, that’s a remarkable success rate for the

Kingdom’s Intermediate champions, who have twice as many All-Ireland titles at this grade as the next best county, Tyrone, with three All-Ireland titles going to the Red Hand county.

It’s notable that no club that has won a senior All-Ireland Club title has an All-Ireland Intermediate (or Junior) title to their name, although there are a couple of clubs that have won All-Ireland Intermediate and Junior football titles (which we will see next week when we select our Best 15 in the All-Ireland Junior Club grade).

Kerry’s first All-Ireland Club IFC title arrived in 2007 when Ardfert beat Eoghan Rua from

Derry by 1-4 to 0-5 in the final. That, in itself, was a brilliant achievement for such a small club, but it was all the more remarkable given that Ardfert had won the All-Ireland Junior title one year earlier (2006) and had followed up their county junior championship title by winning the intermediate crown 12 months later.

Two years later the title was back in Kerry when St Michaels/Foilmore beat Galway champions St Michaels by four points. It was another three years before Milltown/Castlemaine made it a third title for Kerry clubs after a 1-13 to 1-6 win over Davitts from Mayo.

Eight years after their 2007 title, Ardfert were back in Croke Park and back up the Hogan Stand steps to collect the Intermediate cup for the second time, this time with a more comfortable 1-14 to 0-9 win over St

Croans from Roscommon.

Incidentally, Ardfert weren’t the first club to win two All-Ireland IFC titles: that honour went to Cookstown Fr Rock’s from who won it in 2010 and 2013. The Tyrone club beat Spa in that first final and Finuge in the second one, which were the only two years that a Kerry club reached but lost the All-Ireland final.

When St Marys won the 2016 All-Ireland final is was only the second title a county had retained the title; the first came in the first two years of the championship when inaugural winners, Ilen Rovers from Cork, were succeeded in 2005 by Carbery Rangers, also from the Rebel county. It was another three years after St Marys win when Kilcummin came along to win the title for the sixth time for the Kingdom, with their winning score of 5-13 and their 13-point win over Naomh Eanna from Antrim setting new All-Ireland Final records in the competition.