Easy for a team to be dominant in football if you all but ignore hurling

First off, congratulations on your fine sports coverage in the Irish Examiner, even though we think at times there is far too much coverage of English soccer.

I enjoy reading the contributions by your various columnists, but must take exception to comments made by Paddy Heaney in his GAA column on Thursday, February 26.

Paddy maintains that the Kingdom’s superiority in Gaelic football is due to, 1, they play more football than anyone else and, 2, they develop more county players from junior and intermediate teams than anyone else. He also states that Kerry is the only county in Ireland that operates a divisional system. Not true.

Kerry players play more football than anybody else because they are exclusively a football county, bar a small committed pocket of hurling. Just like Kilkenny in hurling, it is easy to be dominant in one code if you almost completely ignore the other. In Cork, we try our best at club and county levels to promote both codes. If we concentrated totally on football as a county, I wonder how dominant Kerry would be then.

As regards Kerry being the only county operating a divisional system, Cork have been doing that since the 1920s and include divisional teams, as well as college teams, in its senior hurling and football championships.

In short, there is nothing new in Kerry that we haven’t been doing here in Cork for years and Paddy would want to get his facts right.

Tom Lyons

Willow Park,

Clonakilty,

Co Cork