Eamonn Fitzmaurice: ‘I don’t think there was any negative undercurrent’
Eamonn Fitzmaurice will have been expecting the line of questioning but he wasn’t all that keen to dig all that deeper into the debate he had stirred in the run-up to this decider last week, .
His talk of narratives and balance when it came to allegations of wrong-doing in the meeting of his Kerry team and Dublin in Tralee three weeks ago had served as an intriguing and unusual backdrop to yesterday’s league final and neither side played like saints.
“I don’t think it was too bad though today, was it? I didn’t think it was as incident-packed as the game in Tralee now. I said what I said during the week. I wanted to provoke debate. I succeeded in provoking debate whereas I think if I hadn’t said something, which I would prefer not to have said to be honest because I just prefer to focus on the football, there wouldn’t have been a debate at all. But there was a debate so from my point of view it was mission accomplished.
“We were just coming up focusing on the football today and that was it. And I’m sure Dublin was the same. I don’t think there was an undercurrent there. There was probably incidents and there was physicality but I don’t think there was any negative undercurrent. For the most part, my reading of the game is that it was a very good game of football.”
It was certainly that, but it wasn’t without its bad points. Or some ugly. Neither team can claim the moral high ground after it but Kerry made the journey home with the win and the silverware. Whatever the means - and there was some superb football played by both sides - this was much better than making the trip southwards with disappointment and regrets.
Only Fitzmaurice’s second win in ten attempts against Dublin, the Kerry manager admitted that it was an important win for a side boasting youngsters making a senior bow at HQ but he disputed the fact that it was some monstrous load off their shoulders.
“I don’t think so. You’re kind of portraying it as if there is this psychological damage there that every time we go out, (that) we’re going down the road and we’re banging our head off the window of the bus. We come up and give it everything we have. They’re a brilliant team and we’ve come up short. But we’ve come up short going at them.
The Kerry-Dublin games over the last couple of years, some of them have been some of the best games that have been played in the last ten years. We’re realistic enough to go away and say, ‘That was good. This is something we need to improve upon’. If Dublin had beaten us, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world. We still have players to come back.
