Battle-hardened Brosna set their sights on Glin

Interviews with managers of sides playing in provincial club finals tend to follow a pattern.

You start off with an easy question asking if they ever thought they’d still be playing into December, but when you’re dealing with a side from north Kerry the rules are different.

The divisional championship there is always played off in the latter part of the year and Brosna’s draw with St Senan’s in last weekend’s quarter-final means that the four semi-finalists won’t be known until after their replay on December 21.

Before then, Brosna have tomorrow’s Munster Club JFC final against Glin in Mallow to deal with. With their county final win over Dromid Pearses played on Nov 15, manager Jimmy Keane believes that competing on different fronts helps to keep the team primed.

“It’s definitely an advantage” he says.

“The junior championship in Kerry is played in two stages, we played the first round in April and the next round in May but then it was parked up until October or November.

“The week before that, we played Tarbert in the first round of the north Kerry championship and that was a great preparation going into the Glenbeigh game. It got us up to the speed of championship football.

“Playing St Senan’s last week was great preparation again for Sunday, you’re trying to take the good out of both championships. One could say that we could have done with a break last week but the weekends aren’t there and the north Kerry board had to drive on with the fixtures.

“Once you’re winning, it’s easy to continue. You’d only be doing recovery sessions in between games otherwise.”

In the Kerry championship, Tarbert, Templenoe, Glenbeigh-Glencar and Dromid all lost by a point to Brosna. Keane points to a strong team ethic as being a key plank of their success.

“We know that we have good players without having any out-and-out stars,” he says.

“If you go to look at Brosna, you can’t pick out any one individual and say, ‘If you stop him, you stop Brosna’.

“I would never wish it ever but it worked in our favour this year that St Kieran’s were the first team knocked out of the Kerry senior championship, that meant that we had our players for all of the year for training and league matches.

“From the start, we believed in ourselves and once we got over the first game away to Tarbert we were saying that it was the road to Croke Park.

“To get there, we had to get over the next hurdle before we could get over any other. We had the bit of luck in each game and then we had from May until November to focus on Glenbeigh. They were involved with Mid-Kerry and they probably didn’t get the time to prepare after the senior final whereas we were focused once the draw was made.”

Since the Munster junior championship began in 2001, only Cork sides Carbery Rangers in ’03 and Canovee in ’07 have prevented a Kerry clean sweep. Keane admits that such a record brings pressure but it’s also inspirational.

“There’s a bit of both,” he says. “You have the pressure because of the club teams that have gone before you, but then you look at Austin Stacks last week and you have to realise what teams from the so-called weaker counties can do. We’d be foolish to think that anything’s going to be any different for us on Sunday. You look at Glin, they’ve won 13 championship games in a row so any team that can do that is a formidable outfit, there’s no way we’ll take anything for granted.