Dingle seek fresh proof of their quality as Kerry title defence begins

Dingle open their Kerry SFC title defence against Spa on Saturday evening

Liam O'Connor: 'It’s just hard to take in that our club, with the small numbers that we have, are All-Ireland champions.' Pic: Brendan Moran/Sportsfile

It’s almost nine months since Dingle scaled the senior club football equivalent of Mount Everest by lifting the Andy Merrigan Cup at Croke Park. To this day, the final victory over St Brigid’s, and the late, late Mikey Geaney winning point, remains difficult to fathom.

On Saturday evening at Austin Stack Park in Tralee (7.15pm), the All-Ireland champions begin the defence of their Kerry title with a banana skin of a first round proper clash against Spa. Life doesn’t stop. The wheel keeps turning, as Liam O’Connor fully realises.

“It’s still hard to take in. You associate All-Ireland senior club champions as being kind of super clubs with big populations, and that sort of thing. Obviously, there have been a few from rural areas. It’s just hard to take in that our club, with the small numbers that we have, are All-Ireland champions.

“When I was playing with Dingle, we used to be beaten in the first round of the intermediate championship every year. To think, that still in my lifetime, I’ve seen the club go on to not just win the county senior championship, but Munster and All-Ireland as well, you have to pinch yourself sometimes to remind yourself that we actually did it,” said the backroom team member.

Lifting the All-Ireland title was not just about Dingle GAA Club. For the entire community in the West Kerry town, and those domiciled all around the globe, this was about a collective sense of pride in what those in the red and white jerseys had achieved on the biggest stage.

“A fella I know who works in Croke Park, he estimated that there were about 4,000 people sitting right behind us that day. Now there were a few neutrals among them, I’m sure, but there were people there with Dingle connections who would have been there with their grandchildren,” added O’Connor.

“I spoke to a man on the day we beat Austin Stacks in the county final, a man in his early 80s, and he said today is great because I thought I was running out of years to see this. When you hear that, it’s special, and his brother was sitting down in America to watch a stream at half eight in the morning.”

When you reach the holy grail of Kingdom, Munster and All-Ireland glory in the one season, what happens next? How do Dingle find the motivation to seek new goals? Tonight will give us the first example of what the immediate future might bring.

“There are some top players in our team. When you’re a top player, you want to be successful, as successful as you possibly can be. This is what sets these fellas apart. They can put something like that behind them fairly quickly and take on the next challenge,” stressed O’Connor.

“I was a member of the West Kerry team in 1984, and West Kerry won the county championship for the first time since Dingle in 1948. It had never gone back west in those years. It was a shared experience between all the players, all the supporters, and all the people of West Kerry.

“That brought great joy, and it went on for months. When we went into 1985, had we been beaten in the first round, the supporters wouldn’t have minded, because they were still floating from the memory of a few months before that.

“The players wanted to test ourselves to see were we a good team because, when you win a county championship, there will be people who will be assessing and analysing it who will say that they had the luck with them, who they played had this fella injured, and a refereeing decision here and there etc.

“A lot of teams can win a championship and go off into the sunset, but serious players, and we have some serious players, they now want to challenge themselves to try and win again.” 

West Kerry went on to beat Feale Rangers to complete back-to-back Kerry titles 41 years ago. For Dingle to do the same, Spa will have to be overcome first. Six weeks ago, at their home ground in Killarney, Spa lost by one point, 1-21 to 2-17, to tonight’s opponents. Dingle were that close to a relegation play-off.

“We scraped out of Spa six weeks ago. They were running rings around us for long passages in that game. They’re a very, very good team, very impressive. It was a ding-dong game. That was a very competitive group.

“We want to try and test ourselves, and see are we a good team, and can we meet the challenge. That’s the big imponderable. Can we meet the challenge that we’re going to get from Spa? Anyone in their right mind wouldn’t be looking beyond that.

“This is not a group system where you can kind of say that if it doesn’t work for us this Saturday we have two more games or whatever. It’s do-or-die, and that’s the same for every team in the championship now. What happened last year is done and dusted. This is a completely new ball game.”