Counties That I Don’t Hate – Down

(No 2 in a series of 2)

Picture it. Waterford. 1991. Since we had won our first ever title in 1929, we had managed to win something – anything – in every decade. Until the 1980’s, that is, when we had not only won nothing but had plumbed the depths of Division Three hurling and been massacred in our three Munster final appearances. We’d even had the privilege of watching the team implode live on national television in the 1989 final. Not a good time to be following the Déise.

The 80’s had been a grim time for the GAA. An All-Ireland hurling semi-final had been attended by a mere nine thousand souls (Galway – Cork in 1985) and the Ulster and Connacht football championships were utterly bankrupt – the champions of those provinces had not beaten a team from Leinster or Munster since Galway in 1973. It’s hard to sustain interest in a sport when there is so little competition among all teams in general and from your own in particular. Add in the thrill of Italia ‘90, and people were asking in all seriousness where the GAA was to go from here.

The first step in the rehabilitation of the GAA came from Meath, or specifically the sensational clash between Meath and Dublin in the 1991 Leinster championship that captured the imagination of a nation. It was so all-consuming that even my mother sat down to watch the fourth and decisive match. I had developed a loathing of the Royal County in the preceding years, fuelled by paternal links with Cork and the cast of, er, characters that populated Sean Boylan’s team. Every match you’d watch hoping they’d trip up, every time they’d sail close to the wind, and every time they’d squeeze through. They were behind for most of the semi-final against Roscommon but with a mixture of grit, nerve and (I can admit this nearly 20 years on) talent, they were ahead at the finish. Another failure from the Connacht crew. It was galling, and all the more compelling for that.

Meanwhile in the other half of the draw, Kerry had sucker-punched a previously dominant Cork to come out of Munster. No one was thinking they were world beaters – the hiding they had taken in the 1990 final and the less-than-stellar manner in which they had disposed of Limerick saw to that – but they were still Kerry, right? Yes, they were and while Down had a cute record of never having lost to Kerry in the championship, they were still from Ulster and thus were going to fill their appointed role as the Munster team’s bitch. Even leading for much of the game did not change that. Had Tyrone not done the same in 1986?

Then it happened. It may not have played out exactly as I remember it, but the sentiment is what matters. A slick Down move saw Peter Withnall put clear through on Charlie Nelligan and he smashed the ball to the net with aplomb. Suddenly Down were in a winning position and they never faltered in the remaining time, belief that they would do it coursing through every action. Watching it at home, I was gobsmacked. A minnow could put it up to one of the kingpins of Gaelic games and succeed.

Five weeks later Down were back in Croke Park against the evil Meed, and it was clear they meant business. The sea of red and black that rippled across Hill 16 was utterly inspirational, one Tricolour-wielding fool only slightly marring the beauty. Down duly shot down Meath, even withstanding one of those famous zombie-like comebacks. For the first time in my lifetime, a team who had no expectation at the start of the year to winning the All-Ireland had won the All-Ireland.

A year later another county would unexpectedly taste success.  I genuinely don’t think this is a coincidence. Could Donegal and Derry have won Sam Maguire if Down had not shown them the way? And why should such a transmission of belief stop at the Ulster border? Since then, I’ve always had a soft spot for Down. They showed the rest of the GAA world that it could be done. And more importantly, they showed me that it could be done, something has sustained me to this day.

The kiss of death

With friends like this, who needs enemies?

Great-ish expectations

The footballers kick off their Sam Maguire campaign today, and no one will be under any illusions that Division Three third-placers and first round Tommy Murphy Cup exiters Waterford are about to power past NFL Division Two winners and Munster champions Cork to secure a tilt at National Football League winners and All-Ireland runners-up Kerry. Waterford’s goal for the season will be to have a run through the back door which should be eminently achievable given the quality of their league campaign – a kind draw would be nice though.

Update: a 14 point defeat probably represents a nudge towards fears rather than hopes. They would have been hoping to do better – unless they’ve put money on scoring a goal, in which case it’s party time!

It had to happen . . .

The 2009 Munster Championship draw took place along with all the other senior action tonight, and no doubt the pundits will be braying with delight at the prospect of Waterford crossing swords with Limerick and their new manager, one J McCarthy of Passage West. This is good, as it should distract from the fact that it is a blissfully soft draw with the three best teams in Munster last year bundled in the other half of the competition and Cork having to play Tipp in the first round.

In the football, we see the pleasure / pain principle at work as Waterford’s reward should they overcome Cork would be a tie against Kerry. C’est la vie.

The Munster draws in full:

Hurling
Quarter-final:
Cork v Tipperary
Semi-finals:
Waterford v Limerick
Clare v Cork or Tipperary

Football
Quarter-finals:
Tipperary v Limerick
Waterford v Cork
Semi-finals:
Tipperary or Limerick v Clare
Waterford or Cork v Kerry

30½ v 1½

One of the more prominent themes about Waterford’s challenge to Kilkenny’s hegemony is that every other county will be rooting for the Déise boys come the first Sunday in September. This theme was challenged by a poster at KilkennyCats.com, suggesting all manner of reasons why people would be rooting for Goliath over David, and listing person or persons unknown who not only subscribe to this view but seem to form a majority of those canvassed.

One is tempted to suggest that this is evidence that you can get any answer you want if you phrase the question correctly. Ask anyone whether they’d rather see cool, clean, culchie hero Henry Shefflin come out on top against a terrace-baiting, jersey-kissing, townie yahoo like John Mullane, and even a few Waterford folk might plump for King Henry.

There are legitimate reasons why someone from a non-participating county might want Kilkenny to win. In the same way that people might root for Michael Schumacher in his pomp or Tiger Woods when he can walk, so people might root for Kilkenny. To see the excellent excel can be a great thrill to the passionate neutral. In addition, it would be naive to think that Waterford haven’t acquired a contingent of detractors over the years. The aforementioned terrace-baiting and jersey-kissing grates with some, the soccer tinge to much of the crowd annoys others. Clare people can’t forgive or forget what happened in 1998. Tipperary people must view Waterford as the single biggest barrier to success having lost five times to us in recent times. Whether you think any the above are reasonable reasons to want to see Waterford fail, they still exist.

For all of that, it seems unlikely that anything other than a small rump of malcontents (© Dessie Farrell) wish Waterford ill next Sunday. I base this not on a belief that any animus to Waterford can be washed away by a flood of Déise tears or any other romantic deus ex machina. It’s that looking back through my own observations on minnows come good over the years, people in the GAA always root for them – to begin with. The examples in the last two decades are legion, but I’ll limit myself to one example – Armagh in 2002. With the relative infancy of the internet leading to sad ignorance on how to handle people online, I imagined to get embroiled in a long-running feud on the GAA Discussion Board with a rather nasty character from Armagh. I swore before their matches with Dublin and Kerry that I would not cheer for them, but in the end found myself swept up in the euphoria of their release from eternal failure. I would be certain that people up and down the land would feel similar given the relatively trivial nature of their respective desires for Waterford to lose.

That doesn’t mean you have to cheer for the minnow in perpetuity. Minnows either become puffed up by their own self importance, thus no longer qualifying as ‘minnows’, or they get mown down by the next generation working their way up. Thus on both counts did I feel justified in cackling with delight when Wexford downed the Orchardmen a few weeks back.

It will be 31 v 1 next Sunday. Here’s to being on the other side of the equation in the not-too-distant future.

Of mice and men

Harold Macmillan famously noted that the thing most likely to upset the political applecart was “Events, dear boy, events.” He came to mind yesterday evening when I was firing up the laptop to compose a scornful lament for the Cork footballers, centred around the notion that if their campaign to oust Teddy Holland was based on their desire to have the very best shot at success then how much less than 1-5 in 65 minutes would they have scored with him at the helm?

Then Cork ripped off 2-2 in the last seven minutes, something that didn’t just knock me out of their stride as this old revision on Wikipedia shows.

It would be a particularly one-eyed supporter who could watch the manner in which Teddy Holland was dumped upon by the Cork panel and not notice the parallels with what went on between the Waterford panel and Justin McCarthy. The comparison isn’t exact. The Cork footballers reacted not just against one man but the entire Cork County Board, an act that effectively set them against the entirety of Cork GAA – people can point to the crowds that turned out in support of the footballers, but that would be to advocate governance by rent-a-mob. And Teddy Holland would not have been human if he didn’t look at the shambles Cork were for 65 minutes against Kerry and not feel a little bit smug at seeing the bastards squirm. Justin McCarthy, on the other hand, must have known he had lost the players after the performance against Clare. Unlike Holland, it couldn’t be said that he hadn’t a fair crack of the whip.

Still, the whole thing still leaves a sour taste. Amidst the general delight at Waterford’s long awaited arrival in the All-Ireland final, there have been a few dissenting voices online who felt disappointment that the team who shafted Justin were now being lauded for their callousness. Bearing in mind the antagonism I feel towards Cork – I haven’t cheered for Cork in a single match since, not even against Kilkenny and Kerry – it’s perfectly understandable that some people would look at Waterford and say “after what happened, no thanks”.

Some might argue that the end has justified the means. Kilkenny people in particular would do well to remember that a very vocal group of them were sharpening the knives for Brian Cody when he dropped Charlie Carter in 2003. Winning the All-Ireland smoothed over any and all ruffled fur, demonstrating that their commitment to fairness stopped at the point you can touch the McCarthy Cup. What happened to Justin was of a different magnitude. Managers are meant to drop players. Players are not meant to drop managers. And the end / means argument assumes that we would not have reached the All-Ireland final without Davy Fitz at the helm. The odds are that we would not be, but it can’t be disputed that the 2007 model actually won stuff. If the players don’t perform on Sunday week, will they consider their losers medals more valuable than a Munster and National League winner’s medal?

You can’t be objective with your own county. If the players had stuffed Justin in a sack and dumped him in the Pill, I’d still support them. That wouldn’t make it right though, and winning the All-Ireland won’t make it right. Won’t stop me enjoying it, but it won’t retrospectively validate what happened either.

Championship draw 2008

Once again, Waterford have the honour of defending the Munster Cup and, in what will surely be viewed as karma for the ‘disgrace‘ of allying ourselves with Cork and Kerry in rigging, er, seeding of the football draw, we’ve got the booby prize of playing in the first / qualifier / preliminary round, thus giving one more game for us to be knocked senseless in. And it’ll be against Clare. Beautiful. Should we win, we’ll play Limerick in the semi-final. You could argue that that will have extra spice this time round after events of 2007, but every Munster championship game has enough spice to go around.

In the football, it’s a repeat of last year; Clare in the first round with three-in-a-row chasing Kerry waiting in the semi-final.

A Farewell to Alms

Much has been made of the need to be sporting in the aftermath of Kerry’s thumping victory over Cork in the All-Ireland football final, with some people embittered over what they felt were ungracious comments by Kerry coach Pat O’Shea, and Cork captain Derek Kavanagh going so far as to accuse the Kingdom of gamesmanship.

I’m not concerned here with the ins-and-outs of these accusations (mainly because I don’t want to be caught saying anything nice about Kerry or Cork), but it got me thinking on something that has been vexing me since I first twigged it way back in 1994, and that is the art of winning and losing well.

I’ve never been very good at competitive stuff – I gave up hurling when I was 14 – so I don’t have much experience of dealing with winning and losing. But the one thing I am good at is quizzes, and for three years at the end of secondary school I was the team captain in the Cork Examiner Munster Schools Quiz, now known as the TCH All-Ireland Schools Quiz.

(I note irritably that there is no list of winners on that website, because we went all the way when it was a Munster-only contest back in 1995. Looks like my finest hour will be forever lost to the Intraweb generation.)

Anyway, the reason the fallout from last Sunday’s match reminded me of smelly school halls and dodgy microphones in the mid 90’s was the concept of magnanimity in victory and dignity in defeat, particularly the latter. Having despatched a team one year – probably the first time out when we reached the quarter-finals – we settled down for the other contest on that evening. It was a good call, because one of the teams utterly imploded in a manner befitting Limerick against Offaly in 1994. Only needing a handful of points in the last round, a couple of conferred answers being enough, they contrived to get every question wrong while their opponents got every question right. It was horrible, and what made it all the worse was the manner in which the captain of the winners-by-default leapt to his feet at the moment the captain of the losers got the last question wrong.

He meant well, his body language suggesting a genuine degree of sympathy with a team blowing it so spectacularly. There certainly wasn’t any arrogance. It wasn’t as if a team as poor as them were going to win the thing outright (ahem). But it looked utterly, utterly wrong. Had I been sitting on the losing team his ‘gesture’ would have come across as kicking a man when he was down.

I vowed there and then never to commiserate with losers. It’s too easy to be generous in the first flush of victory. Conversely, to the victor the spoils, and losers should congratulate an honest winner. I got to demonstrate that before long, and I made a point after the quiz team was beaten in 1993 and 1994 to shake the hand of each member of the winning teams. Good karma for 1995? I like to think so.

At which point, back to the hurling. Three years on, and I can vividly remember a photo of Ken McGrath in the Indo accepting a consoling hand from a Kilkenny player after the heartbreak of defeat to the Cats. The following year, the same man can be seen in the photo above after defeat to Cork, in this case probably waving away the photographer but the principle of stay-out-of-my-face is surely the same.

I was reminded of all this when I saw a photo on the front of the sports section of the Munster Express after we lost to Limerick in August. There it was again, a winner thinking he was somehow being kind by extending the paw.

Am I really being so embittered when I ask winners to refrain from invading the personal space of players who at that moment would probably rather the ground opened up? I’ve heard a line, attributed to that most clear-sighted of philosophers Ger Loughnane, to the effect that he knew no-one had died but that at the moment of defeat it felt worse than anything could possibly be. There is some logic to shaking hand with the foe you’ve locked horns with for the last however-many minutes, particularly in the limpet-like marking that happens in the GAA. But otherwise, winners should leave the losers the opportunity to be the courageous ones and not view it as sour grapes should they not take it.

Hopefully we will be doing all the ignoring in 2008.

Waterford 2-26 (32) Kerry 1-12 (15)

The hierarchy of the Munster hurling championship is not cast in stone, something that’s especially important to emphasis in a week when the Cork footballers are walloped by Limerick in Pairc Ui Chaoimh. Still, broad principles can be derived from history. Cork and Tipperary are the undisputed kingpins, the title of primus inter pares being a matter of dispute between them, with Tipp on top at the moment. Waterford and Clare occupy the bottom rung, neither certain of hegemony over the other but certain that the other three are better than them. Clare definitely have the upper hand at the moment, although Waterford have the succour of actually having a trophy for their troubles. Limerick occupy a spot equidistant between the top and the bottom, oscillating periodically between the two. Where they are at the moment, I can’t / won’t say. Can’t, because who knows at this stage of the championship. Won’t, because I don’t want to betray either a sense of false optimism or pessimism about our chances against them in the upcoming Munster semi-final. As for Kerry, they lie nowhere.

Kerry folk couldn’t get updates on the progress of their team in this match no matter how many radio stations they tuned in to. That is the way it is in Kerry. They have nothing to apologise for in that, and I doubt that they ever do apologise.Bearing that in mind, why is it that in the fear stakes, Waterford are the only county in Munster that fears everyone, Kerry included? We in the Gentle County seem to have a hang-up about every county that plays hurling, with the odd exception of Laois. That’s understandable in the cases of Cork, Tipperary and their ilk. Heck, even the Dublin blot is acceptable, coming as it does in the less-rarefied atmosphere of the National League. But Kerry . . . not only do we fear them, they give us damn all respect. Some might say we don’t deserve any, but there is no way the stories emanating from the Kingdom would have been so belligerent had they been playing any other county, and there is no way they would have put in as gutsy a performance as they did in this game against anyone other than the Déise.

It’s not just 1993, probably the lowest moment in a hurling history graced with visits to Division Three and defeats to the likes of Roscommon, Kildare and Mayo. The feeling of horror is compounded by the game in 1998. Waterford went to Tralee on the back of a fantastic League campaign that should have ended in victory only a week before. It should have been men against boys, but the men were all in Kilrossanty jerseys when the scores were level with only ten minutes to go. A scoring blitz from Dan Shanahan saved the day but it was enough to give Kerry the belief that not only was beating Waterford a possibility but a probability, if only they were stubborn enough.

Anyone who stands in the way of Waterford’s plan for All-Ireland hegemony is inherently evil, so anything Kerry did in Walsh Park as we kicked off (metaphorically speaking) the defence of our Munster crown could be construed as evil. Incidentally it’s rather pathetic that the notion of us being defending champions at, well, anything still manages to send a tingle down my spine. Anyway, Kerry warmed up wearing white shirts that looked suspiciously like a full kit, leading to the more deranged of us to assume that they were going to wear white while we had to wear a change kit of all blue or something similar. The bastards were obviously trying to put some psychological hex over us.

As it transpired, Kerry came out wearing their traditional colours which are indeed modelled on those of the mighty Kilrossanty. Waterford emerged wearing the now familiar but never lovable white shirts with blue shorts and socks. This was the first time I had seen the new Azzurri kit. The first thing to note is to give credit to the Waterford County Board for supporting a local outfit and breaking the O’Neill’s monopoly. In terms of looks, it’s not the greatest kit in the world. The numbers on the back looked like they were part of a generic soccer kit produced for a team of posh Under 11’s, and there seemed to be one blue stripe too many running down from the armpit to the waist. Still, it was refreshingly simple after the previous OTT effort from O’Neill’s, a garment which seemed to come from the art school that involves hurling (pun unintended) anything against a wall and seeing what sticks. What proportion of any distaste for the kit was born of dislike of the blue shorts is hard to tell, but I’m confident it would have looked quite groovy with white shorts.

As the game got closer, I started feeling less nervous. All the blarney about 1993 receded into the distance as Waterford paraded their 12 Munster title-winning players and four All-Stars, if you include the former Hurler of the Year, Tony Browne. The wind favoured Waterford in the first half, which suggested that Kerry had won the toss. Either that, or the Déisemen had learned the lesson of the Dublin debacle in the league when they trailed by a ridiculous amount of points at half-time after playing against the wind in the first half and couldn’t peg back the deficit in the second. Whichever it was, Waterford hit the ground running. Andy Maloney showed a sweet touch as he gathered the ball in his midriff right below us on the bank, then turned, took his time and squeezed it inside the near post and over the bar. “The Tipp shtuf”, chuckled my brother, and we were on our way.

Ken McGrath was also in the mood for some scoring action. Waterford’s play was admirably simple – get the ball on the wing, pass it into Ken and he’d sent it straight between the sticks. Identikit points were tacked on by the centre forward, so much so that Waterford seemed to ghost to 0-5 without doing anything special. Or maybe I’ve just forgotten. The play was good though, fast, direct hurling and none of the Jennet Express so despised by Kevin Cashman. The Waterford full-back creaked alarmingly at times, but generally they held firm. Kerry got their first point at this stage, but this only seemed to spur Waterford to try and get a goal. Ken McGrath had a bullet of a shot brilliantly deflected over the bar by John Healy in the Kerry goal, then Paul Flynn decided to inject a bit of Keystone Cops into the game. First he blocked Healy as he tried to come clear with the ball, leading to the goalie collapsing in a heap that would have embarrassed any of the fanny merchants playing at Stamford Bridge at the time – news had already filtered through from Liverpool that the Reds were losing; thank goodness for the mighty Déise, eh? Then Ken McGrath handpassed Seamus Prendergast into the clear. The big man missed the ball, but so did the Kerry full-back, and after some poking at the sliothar Flynn gathered the ball and extracted a massive ping off the post when it seemed he couldn’t miss the target (NB the woodwork is not the target). No sooner had the hysterical laughter on the terraces died down after that slapstick routine than Flynn was clear in on the left and his rising shot into the middle of the goal found its target. There was more than a hint of good fortune to the goal as he nearly pulled off his markers face as they struggled to reach the ball. No one in white was going to volunteer this information to the blind-sided ref and we looked home and dry.

Nothing is ever straightforward with Waterford though, and Kerry were refusing to roll over and die. It was laudable to see a team refusing to buckle in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds, but would they have been so spunky against any other county in Munster? History suggests not, and John Mike Dooley gave us all a history lesson when he waltzed through the Waterford full-back line to smack the ball low into the net, extracting a huge cheer from the Kerry crowd. There were more of them there than I expected, conceivably a greater proportion of the crowd than had been down in Tralee five years ago. Probably all the Kerry guards and teachers that seem to live in our county like parasites. Waterford weren’t phased by it though and had soon re-established their solid lead, helped in no small part by the efficient free-taking of Dave Bennett. If we can anticipate this quality of marksmanship during the summer, we’ll all probably have a few less grey hairs than were spawned by the don’t-look-now efforts of Paul Flynn last summer.

At this midway juncture of the game – pray that it isn’t the midpoint of the match report, or we’ll miss the All-Ireland final – it would be appropriate to note the performance of referee Pat Ahearn. Truly it was a game of two halves, Waterford receiving all the breaks in the first half and Kerry getting them in the second half. Perhaps it was the wind, perhaps it was the constellations, but it was very strange.

Not as strange as Kerry’s second half revival. Okay, they had the wind now, but two points in as many minutes at the start saw a few fingernails bitten to the cuticles. A comeback was clearly a chimera, but there are memories of the performance three years ago in O’Moore Park when an eight point half-time lead was eroded by a Laois team who seemed to knock everything over the bar from any angle. Had I known that eight of Kerry’s points were to come from the stick of the delightfully-monikered Shane Brick, I might not have been so perturbed, as there’s only so much one man can do.

More worrying was an alarming profligacy in front of the Kerry goal. Not that the points weren’t coming when the chances were presented, Paul Flynn even electing to hit a free over the bar when everyone was craning their necks to see if he’d try another 30 metre howitzer. But goal chances were spurned like Tipperary bacon at a convention of Clare vegetarians. Seamus Prendergast pulled on a loose ball only to watch the ball bobble wide. The goalie threw his fat arse in the path of Prendergast’s shot when it seemed easier to score and the ball somehow looped out for a 65 – which Dave Bennett converted against the wind, so it wasn’t a complete waste. Ken McGrath turned his marker inside out wide on the right but his almost apologetic shot from a narrow angle trickled wide at the far post. Tony Browne pulled on a breaking ball from a narrow angle and was very unlucky to see it flash wide. These missed opportunities prevented the scoreline turning into the avalanche proportions so beloved of the likes of Tipperary against the minnows of hurling.

In the meantime, Kerry would chalk up a couple of points and Waterford would respond in kind. It became evident before long that Kerry’s tactics were to take their points. Goals were needed if they were going to overhaul a 14 point half-time deficit, but they were content just to limit the damage. While they never got closer than 11 points, they kept trying up until Waterford’s second goal. Paul Flynn gathered the ball in the parallelogram with his back to goal and one of the Kerry backs tried to get to the ball by climbing over his shoulder. Flynn struck the ball from over his shoulder like a cricket player sweeping the ball down leg side for six and he got his second goal of the afternoon.

That put the tin hat on it and the match meandered its way to the conclusion, enlivened only by a swashbuckling score from Big Dan. Taking the ball underneath the stand he raced down the sideline and whacked the ball over the bar from the most unlikely of angles, providing sustenance to his ever-loyal groupies in the crowd. 17 points was just about right, just about the minimum score necessary to be a trashing but not so many that it amounted to a facile victory. Big wins, wins in Walsh Park, wins as defending champions, wins of any description. A good day’s work and Waterford can look forward to the Limerick game with the confidence of champions.

Waterford 0-20 (20) Kerry 1-9 (12)

To a neutral, the sight of the Waterford fans who had travelled down to Tralee having a collective heart attack when Kerry drew level in the last eight minutes of this game must have been amusing. To those experiencing it, it was like, well, a collective heart attack.

And it had all started so well. The players soon shrugged off the soul-destroying blow of the league final the previous week and set about the task at hand with a modicum of gusto. Brian Flannery was a particularly helpful addition bursting from the defence to lift the large Waterford contingent on more than one occasion. Playing against Kerry was not a pleasant experience though. My uncle described marking a Kerry hurler as “like trying to mark an octopus”, all flailing sticks and limbs and on one occasion Tony Browne was creased by all eight tentacles of one octopus. The ref took no action though.

And why worry anyway? The Déise were well on top by half-time and cruising. So naturally it began to unravel early in the second half. A mazy set of passing led to a kicked Kerry goal by JM Dooley and Kerry were back in it. As they reeled Waterford in like a weakening shark Kerry sensed victory. One gobshite in front of us greeted every Kerry score with whoops and yells, more with surprise than delight I think.

Level pegging and Waterford were losing their rag. Míceal White was introduced a few minutes earlier and did his level best to get sent off. We needed relief and we got it. Kerry failed to clear adequately and Dave Bennett slotted over the lead point. Dan Shanahan, superb throughout picked up a clutch of scores and we were safe. The final winning margin of eight points certainly flattered us and I won’t relish playing Kerry again for a long time.

Waterford: Brendan Landers, Tom Feeney, Sean Cullinane, Brian Flannery, Stephen Frampton (capt.), Fergal Hartley, Brian Greene, Tony Browne (0-2), Peter Queally, Dan Shanahan (0-6), Ken McGrath (0-3), Dave Bennett (0-1; Sean Daly), Billy O’Sullivan (Miceal White; 0-1), Anthony Kirwan (0-1), Paul Flynn (0-6, 0-3 frees)

Kerry: J. Healy, T. Cronin, S. McIntyre, I. Brick, Pat Cronin, M. McCarthy, WJ Leen, B. O’Sullivan (0-4, 0-2 frees), R. Gentleman (0-2), Padraig Cronin, C. Walsh, T. Maunsell (0-1), V. Dooley (T. O’Connell), I. Maunsell (JM Dooley; 1-0), M. Slattery (0-2)

HT: Waterford 0-10 Kerry 0-3

Referee: Sean McMahon (Clare)