Tony Leen: Kerry finale struggling to keep sated Kingdom fans engaged. Why?

It hasn’t been a championship without other storylines either – the mini resurgences of West Kerry and the new North Kerry amalgamation, favourites East Kerry mercilessly spanked by their Rathmore cousins in the quarter-finals. A first west Kerry derby to boot.

Also, three of the remaining quartet are clubs, which might please the change brigade, with Mid Kerry holding up the divisions’ end at this penultimate stage. They are an intriguing storyline, nonetheless, one of the less feted but always competitive divisions in the county. They don’t have Milltown-Castlemaine but Beaufort and Laune Rangers players are a powerful backbone. This may be their time under Glenbeigh-Glencar’s Peter O’Sullivan (Cork manager John Cleary's brother, Denis, is a selector). They’ve not annexed the Bishop Moynihan trophy since 2008 but were in the 2022 and 2023 finals, losing by a point to East Kerry in the latter.

Dingle, their semi-final opponents Sunday in Tralee, haven’t won the SFC title as the club is presently constituted, and haven’t won one at all since 1948. Ditto for Rathmore, who face 13-time winners Austin Stacks Saturday in Killarney, with their infantry of Rock Street supporters. In terms of the necessary ingredients for a cocktail with a kick, it’s all there.

The hegemony of East Kerry is done with, at least for this year, and ultimately, we are down to the final four in the home of the All-Ireland champions. Gentlemen, start your engines.

And yet…

As with the 2024 renewal, and the one before that if memory isn’t playing tricks, Kerry’s blue riband has again trundled along to a fairly humdrum backdrop, an erstwhile piece of richly-embroidered history just sitting there, threadbare in patches. There is an important distinction between anticipation at the business end and the entity as a whole.

A special committee to examine and change the structures of the competition has done its work, paring back the divisional say to allow more senior clubs fill their lungs on the top floor. In 2026 there will be ten clubs and six divisions in the round of 16.

Ultimately, the aim is to deliver more senior clubs and less divisions but killing off the divisions in Kerry is like shooting Bambi. Nobody wants to put South Kerry, West Kerry or North Kerry out of business and they won’t. The ghosts of Dwyer, Egan, Páidi, or Tim Kennelly would haunt them into their own graves for doing that. But Dara O Cinnéide’s championship review committee, the County Board executive, the players and the dogs on the street recognise privately that interest in representing some of the divisions is waning fast. Hence, for a lot of people in Kerry, the end of season climax is more end-of-season feel about it.

Players and supporters are exhausted and sated after the madcap junior, intermediate and senior club championship and Kerry’s Croke Park annexation of Ulster. Clubber’s rudimentary streaming feed - not to mention its illicit availability on too many dodgy boxes - is enough that folk don’t need to stray beyond the remote control or mobile phone to catch up with the highlight scores for the Monday morning water cooler. The notion of nothing beats being there has been vaporised. As the poet from Inniskeen said: we have tested and tasted too much.

The success, and competitiveness, of Kerry’s intermediate and junior grades has first overshadowed and now threatens to eat whole the big elephant in the room. If the beating breast of the club is ablaze, the spark for some divisions can be hard to kindle nowadays. The inverted trickle-down of Kerry’s two football championships is that the heavyweight now looks saggy while the club campaign feels nimble and visceral.

For instance, Gaeltacht’s players were, understandably, more invested in their own run to a brilliant IFC final win over Fossa than they were in West Kerry’s strenuous efforts to stir some collegiality into the mix beyond Blennerville bridge. Ballymacelligott’s footballers were hell-bent on finally winning the county’s Premier JFC title this year after several near misses. St Kieran’s were a low priority for them.

IT HAS left Kerry’s decision-makers in a pickle but the cards have fallen nicely this autumn to buy some leeway and keep the carping suppressed. The elimination of East Kerry has, with respect to the division, breathed fresh life into this year’s knockout phase. Only the Mid Kerry amalgam has reached the final four and, like many things in Kerry these days, they have the Cliffords to thank for that in a roundabout way. But for their remarkable tour de force with Fossa in eliminating Beaufort in a classic IFC quarter final, the mid Kerry powerhouse may have focusing on an intermediate final and not the county championship. Last time out, Beaufort furnished eight of the Mid Kerry starters.

Other counties like Roscommon and Derry have toyed with the idea of a divisional element to their county championships, while Cork look to be making its own getaway from their traditional structures. Kerry, though, has remained steadfast to the tradition that every player, whatever the grade, has the right and the ambition to play senior championship football. Next spring may see Glenbeigh-Glencar’s Liam Smith make a breakthrough with Kerry on the back of his strong showings around midfield for Mid Kerry. The belief remains that it is the ultimate crucible for a player looking to step up to green and gold. And that the truest measure of a footballer in Kerry after All-Irelands is county championship medals. That lustre remains.

“The county championship has always been the Rolls Royce for us,” said Kerry secretary/CEO Peter Twiss. “The club championships started off as a Toyota, and the model now runs as smooth as the county championship in many respects, but it will never be a Rolls Royce.”

Maybe. The review committee into the championship attracted player feedback from club and from the Kerry panel. Overwhelmingly the consensus across all groups was that the club championships are working very well. The attachment to the divisions in the senior championship is more patchy and circumstantial.

Timing is an issue, at the back end of a busy club season in Kerry. It may get worse if Croke Park eventually settles on the All-Ireland SFC final reverting to August. Kerry has a 16 week window for their football championships between the end of the All-Ireland and the beginning of their commitments to Munster club championships. Reducing that to 14 weeks is a tough needle to thread and may fall back on the provincial competitions. But even then it would be hard to avoid the sense that Kerry’s broadway show was being rushed off the stage asap.

None of that will concern the footballers of Austin Stacks, Rathmore, Mid Kerry or Dingle this weekend. The semis are delightfully balanced. Ciarán Kennedy pulls the strings up front for Mid Kerry, and they are very powerful and athletic across the middle eight. Dingle have had an injury-interrupted season, but in adding Aidan O’Shea and James Weldon to an impressive coaching ticket, they will be some handful if they can get all their leading lights on deck at Austin Stack Park on Sunday. Late fitness tests will decide a lot.

By then, the victor will know their final opponents. Rathmore are the surprise package in some respects but they are out from under the covers now following the remarkable 1-20 to 0-9 destruction of East Kerry. Stacks have the cattle but Darragh Long’s men have blown hot and cold this summer, especially in the club championship. However any side that features Joe O’Connor, Daniel Kirby, Paddy Lane and the soon-to-be-lost-to-Australia Ben Murphy in their offensive gunnery needs minding.

Either way, the final will be broadcast live on national television. As one would expect for the Kerry county final.

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