John Fintan wary of Ulster potential on the big stage
MILLTOWN / Castlemaine boss John Fintan Daly certainly respects the Ulster champs. The Cork native clearly respects Ulster football, full stop. “Ulster have won the last two All Irelands at intermediate level. Cookstown beat Spa two years ago and Lisnaskee won last year,” the Knocknagree native says.
“Ulster have been more dominant in the last few years so this game between the champions of Ulster and Munster is a real crunch tie. Obviously this is where the standard has been set for the last few years. To get out of Ulster it’s harder than to get out of Munster, you’ve got n ine
counties and a level playing field. “They’ve beat Culloville of Armagh in that final, they came into that game as underdogs. They’re a strong team, a good team, a good football team, they’ve got all the rudiments of a good football team and they’ll be very hard to beat.”
It’s been a reasonably quite couple of weeks for the Mid Kerry club ever since they won their Munster title and their subsequent defeat at the hands of Glenbeigh / Glencar in the local championship. A long break isn’t something they’ve experienced a whole lot in recent times as games came hard and fast after Kerry’s defeat in the All Ireland final.
“Milltown came acropper against Glenbeigh in the Mid Kerry championship,” Daly explains. “They were very tired, they couldn’t lift it and they hadn’t been beaten up until that for quite some time. Over Christmas we gave them a break for a while.
“We’d a game there now against the Kerry Under 21s this week, but you might ask are we better off to keep going? Now I don’t think you can keep going indefinitely. You’d be concerned maybe that they haven’t been having competitive games for the last couple of weeks and wouldn’t be able to hit the ground running.
“If we win people will be saying it was the best thing ever, but if we lose people will be saying that that the Glenbeigh game was the reason why, but it’s very hard to say.”
Kerry, as we all know, have a very impressive pedigree in this championships. As a Cork man managing a Kerry team you might expect Daly to be under a little extra pressure than one might normally expect. The man himself doesn’t dispute the proposition.
“Any time you play for Kerry or represent Kerry there’s pressure and there’s nothing wrong with that,” Daly says. “There’s no harm to have pressure, there’s no harm to have expectation. At the same time you’re playing Ulster and Ulster teams have had success against Kerry teams... so are Ulster teams going to be afraid of Kerry teams? Absolutely not.
“Whatever psychological advantage Kerry teams might have in Munster you’re not going to have that here, because there’s a level playing field here. There’s expectation, but there’s also realism. This is the Ulster champions we’re talking about,” he concluded.