Bordering on sweetest win for those best of enemies

THE poet Sir Philip Sidney put it best, when he characterised England’s relationship with France all of 400 years ago: that sweet enemy.

Beyond the boundaries of the south-south west, that’s probably how people view the Cork-Kerry relationship. A presumption that while there’s enmity to some extent, but with a leavening of humour, a certain amount of warmth because of the proximity and presence, in either county, of people from just over the county bounds.

And for a long time, that was fairly true. From around the mid-70s on, certainly, Kerry had the upper hand in football between the two counties, and in the era before the qualifier system being the second-best team in Ireland carried no cachet for Cork.