County football supremo should heed the lesson of old battles lost

CORK football manager Billy Morgan’s complaints after last Sunday’s game against Kerry seemed like sour grapes.

Claiming that the referee had not done Cork any favours seemed utterly puerile. Did he really expect favours? When Kerry beat Cork in the National League earlier in the year, Morgan denounced the winners: “People look at the northern teams and criticise them for their cynicism, but the most cynical team is down south”, he complained. “They tried to intimidate some of our players. I counted three or four times when a Kerry player came in with the straight elbow after one of our players had passed the ball away. That off-the-ball stuff has no place in the game”.

Such conduct should never be tolerated. Most Kerry supporters would agree with that, but then Billy Morgan does not have the record as a good judge as far as Kerry people are concerned. In 1994, two of the great gentlemen of Kerry football — Eoin ‘Bomber’ Liston and Denis ‘Ogie’ Moran — were having a drink in a Cork pub after the Munster final when they heard that Morgan had opened his own pub.