Morgan's men need to find dramatic improvement to rekindle interest

Munster Final: A friend in Cork denies morale is as low among football supporters as it has ever been in the past two decades, instead describing the mood as one of "total apathy".

If so it's catching, with the Munster Council ticket sales by the end of the week indicating that 11,000 had been shifted in Kerry and only 2,500 in Cork - leaving a big reliance on the walk-up crowd tomorrow afternoon in Killarney.

Cork manager Billy Morgan has made a raft of changes after the widely denounced semi-final win over Limerick four weeks ago but it's hard to tell where necessary corrective action ends and desperation begins.

Morgan will have a plan for Kerry but whether he has the players to implement it is open to doubt.

He will be encouraged by the fact Kerry themselves have been in poor form, recording lacklustre wins over Waterford and Tipperary.

Were everything up and running for Cork, it would be possible to fancy them as an outside bet given the champions' indifferent displays.

One reasonable point made about the two teams is that with their superior underage record over the past few years Cork have no great reason to feel intimidated by Kerry.

Even the senior precedent isn't entirely damning because if last year's All-Ireland semi-final between the teams was an embarrassment for Cork they were competitive in this fixture 12 months ago.

That challenge was led at centrefield, where Derek Kavanagh played well - his injury for the August match being one of the contributory factors in the hammering - but Kerry have brought in Kieran Donaghy to partner Darragh Ó Sé and he has improved the ball-winning capacity.

Coincidentally, his fellow contestant from TG4's Underdogs series Pierce O'Neill (coach Jarlath Burns said both of them would get onto county teams - and here we are) makes his debut tomorrow but without the benefit of an NFL campaign behind him.

O'Neill is expected to move to centrefield, with Nicholas Murphy switching to centre forward. It is in the forwards that the greatest reservations exist about Cork's challenge.

The exclusivity of the attacking threat against Limerick was well illustrated with James Masters scoring eight points out of nine, including all five from play.

Once again Masters looks the outstanding scoring threat but he won't be allowed carry that sort of a scoring burden in the company of Marc Ó Sé.

His colleagues up front for the most part, Murphy, Fintan Goold, Kevin McMahon would be more convincingly cast as deeper-lying forwards than out-and-out scorers.

One way or the other, Kerry's backs look well able for the task of preventing their opponents from accumulating a winning total.

There will be plenty of interest in what happens at the other end - the extent to which the misfiring home attack can improve on previous outings.

Graham Canty and Anthony Lynch in the Cork defence are the team's most influential players, and how they are deployed will be an important factor in the afternoon's outcome.

Unless Kerry continue on their flat trajectory and Cork's graph leaps up markedly for this match, it's hard to look beyond the champions.

Kerry: D Murphy; A O'Mahony, M McCarthy, M Ó Sé; T Ó Sé, S Moynihan, M Lyons; D Ó Sé, K Donaghy; P Galvin, D O'Sullivan, E Brosnan; C Cooper, B Sheehan, P O'Connor.

Cork: A Quirke; M Prout, G Canty, K O'Connor; M Shields, G Spillane, A Lynch; D Kavanagh, N Murphy; S O'Brien, P O'Neill, K McMahon; J Masters, F Goold, D O'Connor.

Fitzgerald Stadium, Sunday, Throw-in - 4pm