More cup heartache but our day will surely come

DISAPPOINTMENT, like charity, starts at home. Sunday was a wicked, raw day, the kind of day you wouldn’t put a dog out. Well whatever about dogs, the club footballers and hurlers were out in their thousands on the playing fields of Ireland.

Fitzgerald Stadium was no exception, as the East Kerry SFC O’Donoghue Cup was taking place.

Kilcummin were trying to bridge a 35-year gap against almost perennial winners, the great Dr Crokes.

But at the end of the game, we were two points adrift, and another one bit the dust.

Kilcummin has a great group of players but haven’t got the rewards they deserve at senior level. In the last seven years, Kilcummin have been in four East Kerry finals and one county senior football final (2002) and lost them all.

Sunday’s pill was, therefore, very hard to swallow.

We created four goal chances but didn’t score any. We hit the post, the crossbar and missed a penalty.

Crokes with county players, Kieran O’Leary, Eoin Brosnan and Colm ‘Gooch’ Cooper to the fore deserved their win and the losers can have no excuses.

We can’t even blame the referee. Eddie Walsh, a Corkman, couldn’t have been better or fairer. So we must dust ourselves down, start again and bring that most beautiful little cup, the O’Donoghue Cup, back to the village. It has to happen sometime soon. Hope springs eternal.

While we were huddled together in Killarney, word came through that the most successful club team in Ireland, Nemo Rangers had been beaten by the Limerick champions Drom-Broadford.

What a fabulous achievement. If Broadford were never to win a match again, this day will go into the record books to be talked of forever in that lovely Limerick parish. They now play Clare champions Kilmurray-Ibrickane in the final. And isn’t that the beauty of the club championship? A good club side from any county can progress and certainly having Limerick and Clare teams in the football final is something that all football followers will welcome and admire.

Wouldn’t it be great if one of them could go on to win All-Ireland honours on St Patrick’s Day?

It is easy to see Broadford’s victory in isolation.

But in recent years Limerick are putting up more and more consistently credible performances at many levels in football. The senior footballers were only two minutes away from beating Cork in this year’s Munster Championship and now, that the open draw has, thankfully, been restored, maybe 2009 could see the men in green making their long overdue breakthrough in the province.

Either way, it’s a sign of the health of the GAA in Munster to have club teams from Clare and Limerick contesting the senior club football final and a novel pairing, Adare from Limerick and De La Salle from Waterford in the senior club hurling final.

Well, if Drom-Broadford can beat Nemo and De La Salle can win the Waterford hurling championship, Kilcummin’s day has to come as well.