McCarthy: Kerry-Cork Killarney history is irrelevant on Sunday
By Peter McNamara
“If we win, then the next thing someone will say is, ‘Well, you haven’t beaten them in Croke Park yet, have you’. There’s always the next thing that people try to put a negative spin on.”
Never a truer word spoken by Cork selector Ronan McCarthy as the Rebels prepare to venture to Killarney for the Munster SFC final once more on Sunday.
Cork, consistently damned if they do and utterly lambasted if they don’t!
Éamonn Fitzmaurice, Kerry supremo, said last week Cork were the most maligned team around.
Normally, you take the musings of a Kingdom boss ahead of a Munster final with a pinch of salt.
However, Fitzmaurice just wasn’t paying lip service to the Leesiders.
Yet, there genuinely does seem to be a deep-rooted resolve in this Cork unit, most likely accrued due to the disparaging opinions of so many towards them, as McCarthy illustrates.
“The key thing is that the football is there in this group of players,” McCarthy said. “I think the resilience is there and the belief is there.
“It is justified criticism in ways from people because we failed to perform in three big matches in the last 12 months.
“So anyone who says to me there is a question mark over us, then that is a valid criticism to make based on the evidence.
“My belief, though, going into this game is that there is something in this group and that we will perform.”
Interestingly, after Cork defeated Kerry in the league by 11 points (3-17 to 2-9), fellow selector Don Davis agreed with similar sentiments.
“They are a really solid bunch of players and that is showing,” Davis stated in March. “We are after coming back in two games that we should have been beaten in and we were unlucky to not get
something out of the game in Donegal even though, admittedly, we did not play particularly well.
“Out there today though I think our lads played some exceptional football.
“There is (something different about this group). There is a great sense of unity there with everybody involved.”
Maybe, just maybe, Cork have come to the end of their tether listening to critique after critique and are simply fed up of it to the point a huge performance is on-track from them.
Traditionally, however, that has not been the case, particularly with the Leesiders yet to record a victory in Fitzgerald Stadium since 1995.
Still, that does not faze McCarthy one iota.
“When I went down to Kerry for my first game against them in 1998 we had won four of the last five times we had been down in Killarney but that fact didn’t make me feel any more confident that we were going to win on the day. And we didn’t.
“People like to throw stats around and ask about the game in ‘95 and so on. Look, the game in ‘95 or the game in 2002 that we drew have absolutely no relevance at all to what is going to happen on Sunday against Kerry.
“This record in Killarney is thrown about, but over 20 years there has not been 10 games there because we did not play there in ‘97 and or 2003.
“It has been eight games and we have drawn three, and in a lot of them there was a kick of a ball in it.
“In ‘98 even, my first game in Killarney, we got a goal from Alan O’Regan and we led with 12 minutes to go.
“They went straight up the field and Maurice Fitz scored and they ran out winners from there.
“I recall Colin Corkery having to push the crowd back from the sideline before taking a free in ’95 and that was a great memory of that day but none of those games in the past have any bearing on this match we have on Sunday,” he added.
