Dingle dilemma: Celebrate first county in 77 years or join the Kerry team holiday to Nashville?
PLANES, TRAINS: Dingle captain Paul Geaney may need a lie down as he follows up his man of the match display in Sunday's Kerry SFC final with a night of celebration in West Kerry and then an overnight journey to Dublin to catch a flight to Nashville. Pic: Brendan Moran/Sportsfile
Fromthe symbolical walk west across Blennerville Bridge on Sunday night with the Bishop Moynihan Cup to a transatlantic flight Monday from Dublin to Nashville, Tennessee. If a few of Dingle's newly minted Kerry football champions aren't quite sure what time zone they're in, they could be forgiven.
However long midfielder Mark O'Connor manages to soak in the celebrations and evade the gravitational pull of a return to Australia, some of his Kerry colleagues have already had to pull stumps on the hometown madness.
What a choice: Celebrate a first county in 77 years with your friends and colleagues or join your other family, the Kerry team, on an all-expenses paid holiday to Nashville and Mexico? Quite the dilemma.
Skipper Paul Geaney delivered an impressive and thoughtful address to the masses in Dingle town late Sunday night, thanking everyone from mentors to club lotto ticket sellers and insisting this cannot be a one-hit wonder for the club. In doing that, he spoke to the children present with the fervent hope that he would be among the crowds in years to come celebrating their county title successes.
Then, along with his inter-county colleagues Conor and Dylan Geaney, they made for Dublin at 2am Monday to be part of the travelling Kerry party heading off on their All-Ireland winning holiday to Nashville and on to Mexico.
Not everyone made the flight. The two O'Sullivans — Tom Seán and Tom Leo — found the local flavour too intoxicating to leave. "Sacred" was how the experienced was labelled early on Monday. They may join up with their Kerry colleagues later this week.
Mark O'Connor won't be around long, he admitted. "I'll probably get a couple of weeks out of it, but at least they will be enjoyable weeks," he said after Sunday's 2-13 to 1-12 win over Austin Stacks.
That would rule him out of Dingle's Munster Club SFC semi-final clash with the Limerick football champions on November 23, but manager Padraig Corcoran and his mentors would have already budgeted for that. Getting him to Tralee on Sunday was a bonus.
"I think I was asked by someone after our quarter-final win whether Mark would be involved, and I hadn't even spoken to him at that stage," Corcoran said Sunday night. "I actually met him at a wedding the next day, and put together a basic plan then. When he is home, he is always trying to play, in fairness."
Added O'Connor: "I only got a couple of sessions in, and the rules seem to be changing every time I come home. I can't blame the new rules for that early black card, mind — I don't think that's ever been allowed, but it's been very much catching up on the fly. But it's all good now, isn't it? I was trying to downplay it coming in, because I haven’t had too much prep, but we got there. It's hard to take in, it really is. I'm trying to manage my emotions, but they are close to cracking."
Of the quartet of starting midfielders in Sunday's final, three are household names for various reasons — Mark, Joe O'Connor, and teenage starlet Ben Murphy of Austin Stacks. He may not be as well known outside west Kerry, but the stellar display by 36-year-old Billy O'Connor for Dingle in the final was noteworthy too.
The three Geaneys will be back from Mexico early next month — manager Jack O'Connor hasn't travelled — by which time the Dingle club should have advised the county board of their nomination for Kerry captain in 2026. It would be some surprise if it wasn't the man who delivered the bon mots from the platform in the town on Sunday night.
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