Mike Breen hoping to end 'tough' year on a high with Mid Kerry

BACK IN ACTION: Mike Breen tackles Josh Crowley Holland of Templenoe during the Kerry County Football Championship quarter-final at Fitzgerald Stadium in Killarney, Kerry. Pic: Brendan Moran/Sportsfile

If 2021 was a dream, then 2022 was a full disaster.

Prior to last year, Mike Breen had never set foot in a Kerry senior panel. An invite from then manager Peter Keane changed that. But it turned out to be more than an invite. It was an express ticket onto the starting team.

Kerry played four championship matches in 2021. Newcomer Breen started them all.

From couch supporter during the 2020 Covid championship to starting debutant eight months later. You couldn’t make it up. Neither could you make up his second season. Or, rather, his total lack of season two.

Breen started Kerry’s 2022 opener. A January 5 McGrath Cup hammering of Limerick. It was his first and last game in the green and gold this year.

A hamstring injury sustained little over a week later during a training session at Fitzgerald Stadium laid waste to his inter-county year. Six months followed on the sideline.

“I was walking around for a few days just dragging the leg after me and it kind of went black then. I knew that something bad was after happening when it started bruising. I went up to the consultant in Cork and they said to have surgery on it,” Breen recalled this week.

“The hamstring wasn’t actually off the bone. The middle of the hamstring was completely torn apart. Say the hamstring was a rope and you’d cut the middle of it. Just completely torn. I suppose that's why it took a long time to heal.” 

Breen got back inside the whitewash two weeks before the county’s July All-Ireland final win. He participated in Kerry sessions on the run-in to the final, but there was minimal contact from teammates. He was in there and he wasn’t.

“It was tough enough,” he said of his peripheral status in 2022, sharpy contrasting with the “dream stuff” of having been a first-team regular during his debut year.

“The first few games in the league I found nearly as tough as watching the All-Ireland final. Just missing out, thinking about it.

“After I came off the crutches, I was doing my rehab inside with them. I felt part of it again. I was delighted for them when they won.” 

There was a second hamstring injury - on the other leg - that limited his Mid Kerry involvement as the county championship threw in last month. The quarter-final against Templenoe was only the second game he started and first that he finished.

On Sunday, he will captain the division in the Kerry county final. The same as 2020, East Kerry sit tall in the opposing corner. It is 14 years since last a Mid Kerry man lifted the Bishop Moynihan Cup.

“I’m just delighted to be back playing. It’s great to be in a county final. 2020 didn’t feel like a final with 200 people there. It was very quiet. There was no marching band or anything like that.”