The Kerryman (South Kerry Edition)
Crokes defeat will stand to Kilcummin
ALL IRELAND CLUB IFC SEMI-FINAL Kilcummin v Two Mile House (Kildare) Sunday, January 20 The Gaelic Grounds, Limerick 2pm
IT’S never nice to lose.
It’s never nice to have your deficiencies exposed by the best of the best. It’s frustrating. It’s maddening. Doubly so when it’s your neighbours and great rivals who are the ones doing it to you.
For Kilcummin, though, there might actually be an upside to their humbling experience in the O’Donoghue Cup final. There’s no shame in losing to Dr Crokes – probably the most ruthlessly efficient club side Kerry football has ever produced – and the defeat coming when it did may well stand to Kilcummin.
For one thing it was a competitive game. It will have helped bridge the gap between Munster and All Ireland competition, keeping Kilcummin focussed and, more importantly, sharp ahead of this weekend’s All Ireland semi-final.
On top of that the game will have served as a wakeup call. There were probably warning signs against Fermoy in the Munster final – the Cork champions cut them open on occasion, but didn’t deliver the type of knock-out punches required to derail Kilcummin.
Dr Crokes were never likely to be as forgiving as Fermoy and as a result Kilcummin conceded a hefty 3-24. It may not have felt it at the time, but Crokes probably did Kilcummin a favour in that O’Donoghue Cup final.
Lessons from that game can be carried into this weekend’s contest with Two Mile House. True enough Two Mile House are no Dr Crokes – hey, who is? – but Kilcummin will have to afford them every respect or else they could find themselves in real trouble.
Complacency won’t be an issue, not after the O’Donoghue Cup final, not at this stage of the competition and certainly not against a team of the quality of Two Mile House.
As Leinster champions they command respect, more so even than that they command respect because of what they’ve previously done on the All Ireland stage.
Two Mile House claimed the All Ireland Junior Club Football Championship title in 2014 (they saw off Roscommon side Fuerty, who beat Keel in the All Ireland semi-final that year in Rathkeale, in the final 5-7 to 1-11).
Two Mile House’s journey to this All Ireland semi-final, then, is much different then than Kilcummin’s.
Two Mile are strivers, climbing gradually up the greasy poll of Kildare and Leinster football.
They’ve gone from being a junior club, to an intermediate club, to a senior club in a relatively short space of time. That speaks to their ambition, to their determination and drive. It speaks to their quality.
A good proportion of the side which saw off Fuerty in that high-scoring final five years ago will still be on the pitch in the Gaelic Grounds this weekend – guys like Mark Sherry, Chris Healy and Aidan Casey for instance. The contrast between that experience and Kilcummin’s is quite stark. Instead of gradual progress of the type Two Mile House have made over the last decade, Kilcummin’s project has quite often been one of retrenchment.
Kilcummin hung on in there as a senior side for twenty years before being relegated – only on occasion threatening to make the breakthrough (in 2002 they contested the final and in 2007 they lost out to eventual champions Feale Rangers at the semi-final stage).
Probably it won’t be until next Sunday afternoon that we’ll discover for certain, which is the best preparation for a game such as this. We suspect that Kilcummin’s senior experience will be a major boon to them. That experience of regularly playing top quality sides in domestic competition just has to stand to them.
The thing is though we only have to look at the experience of sides like Ardfert and St Marys to know that it’s possible for previous All Ireland junior winners to lay claim to the intermediate title (twice in Ardfert’s case!).
Kilcummin will go into the game as warm favourites, nevertheless it’s easy to imagine this being a close run thing, especially if Kevin McCarthy fails to recover fully in time for this weekend.
The Kerry forward has had a torrid run of injuries of late. Having broken his hand playing for East Kerry in the County Championship semi-final with Dingle, he only just made it back in time for the Munster final with Fermoy.
Alas he lasted only ten minutes in that final before breaking his hand a second time (albeit in a different place). That injury – picked up on November 26 – put him out for eight weeks, which leaves him on the cusp of being able to participate against Two Mile House. Kilcummin boss Willie Maher will be keen to have his star man back in to the fold for such an important game, but there must be a chance that the Kilcummin brain-trust holds him in reserve, giving him every chance of being fit for any potential final. Should Kilcummin’s participation in that final look in jeopardy, however, we can be fairly certain that Maher and co will pitch the inter-county star into the fray to resume his partnership with corner-forward Noel Duggan. The likelihood is the Kerry champs will probably need that bit of extra firepower to get over the line here against a Two Mile defence that has an All Star defender as its linchpin in the form of Peter Kelly.
Two Mile have plenty of quality as one would expect of the Leinster champions – Chris Healy (scorer of three points from play in the Leinster final) and Mark Sherry have also featured for the Kildare seniors. They play a nice positive brand of football, with their midfield highly regarded, they’re going to give Kilcummin nothing easily. This is a game that will probably come down to a score of two either way.
We just have a feeling that Kilcummin’s senior experience will give them that all-important edge. Ver
dict: Kilcummin