League title to go south

SHOULDER TO shoulder on the doorstep of summer, Cork and Kerry presented their credentials yesterday. Quite impressive too.

SHOULDER TO shoulder on the doorstep of summer, Cork and Kerry presented their credentials yesterday. Quite impressive too.

Two interesting, if not compelling, National Football League semi-finals at Croke Park ended with the ancient rivals doing sufficient to suggest that the southern hegemony over football might be about to re-establish itself.

However reticent footballers are about expressing their desire to win the League while the championship looms, the secondary competition often takes on a momentum of its own in the late stages. Thus it is with Cork and Kerry, who will move with mixed feelings towards the League final in a fortnight's time at (pending confirmation) Pairc Ui Chaoimh. The Munster championship draw has allowed for the possibility of a Cork/Kerry final. The League final match-up allows the two sides to trade psychological haymakers.

Kerry were first out of the traps yesterday, with an early afternoon entanglement with Laois. It will be remembered that Lao is advanced to yesterday's game two weeks' ago via one of those League quarter-finals inspired by the X Files, when Derry, previously robust and eager and very serious about the League, suddenly turned into 15 blancmanges and permitted Hughie Emerson to score three goals.

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The virus seemed to have infected Laois yesterday and for much of the first half they seemed to wish that they could be someplace else. Kerry punished their wobbliness early and often. Maurice Fitzgerald, who had another of the afternoons when he looks like the best footballer in the country, scored an early goal and tossed a few points in for good measure as Kerry galloped into a quick six-point lead.

It took Laois until the 15th minute to muster a reply and they waited until the second half before they registered a real challenge, with young Ian Fitzgerald making the case for it to be compulsory for every county in the country to play a person of that surname in the forwards.

Having trailed by five points at half-time, Laois enjoyed the reviving tonic of a penalty early in the second half. Fitzgerald, with a rather unorthodox sideways run-up, converted the kick with some aplomb. But encouragingly for Kerry fans the response was immediate and categoric and Kerry managed to stay three or four points ahead until they got a penalty of their own (converted by Maurice Fitzgerald) to wrap up the match.

Paidl O Se, coming into his second championship in charge of the Kerry side, was exceedingly well pleased with the progress of his team. Not having won an All-Ireland since 1986 or a League title since two years before that, Kerry are still searching for the right formation, and up till yesterday had used 32 players in the eight League games to date. The opportunity to gain more confidence and cohesion before the summer was welcome.

"We have a developing team," said O Se', "and we need all the football we can get. We put in a good performance today. Maurice Fitzgerald was outstanding, putting the ball about in the forwards, and we get the chance now at a national title."

His point found an echo in the view of another star of the afternoon, Seamus Moynihan, who reasoned that "when you are building a team the League is very important".

Having beaten Cork in the League recently, the possibility of getting another win under their belts before the summer was enticing. O Se was pleased with the possibility, but mindful of the domestic gallery.

"A lot of the old stagers in Kerry, they've only one thing on their minds, the red jersey in a Munster final, but I think it's good for the team to reach a National League final."

For their part, `the red jerseys' found themselves facing Kildare in a fixture the sub-plot of which was more complicated than the football. Larry Tompkins, the Kildareman exiled to Cork, versus Mick O'Dwyer, the Kerry guru exported to Kildare one flank of Kildare's attack gone missing through "indiscipline" and Cork playing a formation which bore no relation to the team they had picked.

The game appeared to have resolved itself in relatively straightforward fashion when Cork's twin-pronged full forward line helped itself to a couple of goals in the opening seven minutes, the damage of Steven O'Brien's second minute plundering being aggravated by Aidan Dorgan's excellent score five minutes later.

By the 18th minute Cork were eight points ahead and Kildare's defence looked like six sheets of paper coming out of an office shredder. They were bound together again by Mick O'Dwyer's Gravin half-time talk, and scored a good goal of their own through Padraig Graven early in the second half.

Niall BuckIey tagged on a point, and suddenly Kildare were within two points and it became apparent that a sizeable proportion of the 26,978 crowd were from Kildare and had just recovered the gift of speech.

Kildare's half back line upped the pace and the middle third of the field became a place of attrition. Yet, despite having the wind at their backs and the roars of their countymen in their ears, Kildare never quite closed the gap and finished four points behind. Some things have changed since Mick O'Dwyer was last in Kildare, but not the accuracy of their forwards. Umpires still flinch and shield their faces when a lily white jersey bears down on goal.

Cork's full back, Mark O'Connor felt that the roots of his side's modest second half performance lay in their own carelessness rather than Kildare's new cohesion. "The only thing that was disappointing was our tendency to kick away possession in the second half, and on top of that we started to play as individuals."

For Larry Tompkins, the Cork manager in his first year at the tiller, the fact of having beaten his own county in a big game at Croke Park was secondary perhaps to what lies ahead in two weeks. He was inclined to think that the League final was no place for shadow-boxing, that both Cork and Kerry will be at full tilt in two weeks' time.

"It's a major competition," he said. "I don't think either team will be pulling their punches."

Seconds out, then, for the first ding dong of the summer season.