The Kerryman (South Kerry Edition)
Munster agony and ecstacy
ONE weekend, two very different sets of emotions for two north Kerry clubs.
For Ballyduff despair. For Finuge elation. Saturday sadness followed by Sunday satisfaction. On Saturay Ballyduff made the trip to Tipp to take on Silvermines in the Munster Intermediate Hurling Championship final. On Sunday Finuge travelled to Mallow to take on Cork kingpins St Vincents in the Munster Intermediate Football Championship Final. For Ballyduff hopes were high. This was their second appearance in the Munster final in as many years afterall.
They weren’t expected to win their Munster semi-final clash with Limerick’s Ballybrown in Kilmallock. The first half played along those lines. Ballybrown looked the more impressive side, but in the second half Ballyduff caught fire. A Gary O’Brien goal in the second half secured a draw for the Kerry hurling champs and in extra-time they simply blew the Limerick champs out of it with a display of power and pace.
It was that second half, coupled with their experience of twelve months previous, that gave them such hope ahead of the final. Silvermines would be good. They’d probably be the best team they ever faced in the competition in their three years participating in it.
Nevertheless Kerry folk headed for Thurles that November morning full of hope. Hope that was most certainly not misplaced on the basis of Ballyduff’s first half performance
They were simply sublime... except for their failure to put enough scores on the board. That would surely come back to haunt them. It did.
Silvermines upped their performance in the second half to a level that Ballyduff couldn’t match and yet it still took Silvermines until the final few minutes of the game to see off the Kerry champs, but when they did they simply burned them off running out 0-14 to 0-8 winners.
Finuge, on the other hand, began and ended the month as champions. At the beginning of the month they defeated Spa in a brilliant display of football in the County Intermediate Football Championship Final replay with Pat Corridan to the fore – they ran out 1-12 to 0-12 winners, a scoreline that didn’t accurately reflect Finuge’s dominance. After the game it emerged that Eamonn Fitzmaurice, the new Kerry football manager, would miss their Munster campaign owing to a broken jaw he sustained in the replay.
That wasn’t expected to affected their chances against Limerick Pallasgreen in the Munster semi-final and it didn’t. Fitz’s injury was more of a concern for the Munster Final against Vincents.
That and the suspension of Paul Galvin for a straight red card picked up in that semi-final win in Bruff (2-9 to 1-9). It was because of those two losses that Vincents were many people’s fancies for the Munster title.
We shouldn’t have doubted Finuge, winning against the odds is kind of their thing. With James Flaherty scoring 1-3 they ran out 1-5 to 0-5 winners and with the cup a place in the All Ireland semi-final when – yes you’ve guessed it – both Galvin and Fitzmaurice should be available to them.