AIB All-Ireland Club SFC semi-final: Errigal Ciaran v Dr Crokes (Sunday, 3.30pm, Portlaoise, live on TG4)
WHEN Errigal Ciaran first journeyed into an All-Ireland semi-final, the weather played havoc.
The last Sunday of February 1994 and the team were in their Dublin hotel, about to depart for Newbridge when a call came through to the front desk.
Supporters travelling down had heard it given out on the radio that the match with Nemo Rangers was postponed. They called the hotel, whose staff broke the news.
Errigal had travelled down the night before whereas Nemo Rangers were on the train up from Cork when they got word.
If the GAA is to make a similar decision over Errigal’s third attempt this weekend, news will disseminate a bit more quickly.
There is a good chance of it. It is hard to delve too deep into a game you get the sense might not be played.
Pitch inspections are due to take place on Saturday and Sunday.
Met Eireann is forecasting that Portlaoise will freeze on Saturday night and be given no chance to thaw on Sunday, peppered by heavy sleet in temperatures that won’t lift anything from the ground.
The pitch itself might be playable but when you have two sets of spectators facing a 300-mile round trip, the call will have to come early.
When the GAA didn’t make the call early last year and let Kilmacud and Glen travel to Newry, it was too late then when everyone was in the ground.
What resulted was a farcical occasion played in thick fog through which even the players on the pitch admitted struggling to be able to see.
So forgive this day, our daily bread, for a slight absence of enthusiasm. If nothing else, you’d want better for a game like this than for it to become an episode of Dancing On Ice.
But games have been played in far worse. So let’s be prepared anyway.
This will be Errigal’s third All-Ireland semi-final. That doesn’t feel like a wealthy figure but only Crossmaglen (11), Burren (5) and Scotstown (4) from Ulster have appeared in more than three of them.
Dr Crokes will be taking part in their ninth, all of which have been since 1991.
Pat O’Shea tends to have a galvanising effect on them.
This is the former Kerry manager’s third spell in charge of his club.
In his first term, they won Munster in 2006 and lost the All-Ireland final after a replay to Crossmaglen.
He came back and took them to the Andy Merrigan in 2017, in a spell that saw them win three Kerry titles, two Munster and reach two All-Ireland finals.
The Midas touch is working again.
To win Munster this time, the hardest work was done early. They were better than Loughmore-Castleiney in the final and sloppy on a boggy Fraher Field against Rathgormack, but their two previous outings saw them past Castlehaven and Dingle.
In the Kerry final, they scored two fortuitous goals that swung the balance.
When they faced the Cork champions, it was pretty hot and heavy by modern football’s standards.
Gavin White and Brian Hurley hopped off each other more than a few times.
In the end, Hurley got booked for giving out to the referee and then got booked again moments later for ploughing recklessly into White. There were five points in it then but it didn’t feel quite like a five-point game, it still had life.
The red card didn’t even snuff it out. Damien Cahalane roofed another penalty, just as he did in last year’s Munster final, to cut the gap to three heading into stoppage time. Crokes finished seven clear.
Against Rathgormack, they shook it off to go three clear.
In the provincial final, it was 0-4 to 0-3 at half-time. Crokes pushed 0-13 to 0-5 ahead.
And against Dingle in the Kerry final, they’d been behind for 42 minutes before the goals arrived. They were never behind again.
In true Kerry style, the more open the game is, the more is suits them.
Tony Brosnan caught the eye domestically but the real star throughout their run has been Micheal Burns.
Axed from the Kerry panel by Jack O’Connor in February last year, he seems to be running on that angry fuel.
He told Colm Parkinson’s Smaller Fish podcast in November that he had had been “more told I wasn’t wanted than leaving the panel,” saying that O’Connor saw no role for him.
Rathgormack was a dog of a game. Cold, wet, windy, a pitch as brown as it was green with so much give in it you might have lost a man or two down it.
Crokes won by a point, and deserved to. Of their nine points, Burns was involved in eight of them.
He has played inside at times, deeper in other moments, roving and running the show. Who Enda McGinley details to track him and how well they do it will go a longer way to deciding the winner than what they do with Brosnan.
Brosnan was brilliant in the early rounds but tapered off a bit until the Munster final, when he was back at his best.
They’ve the obvious threat of Gavin White attacking from centre-back.
Errigal might be tempted to line Darragh Canavan out there but you suspect Crokes would only push White to the wing and leave Evan Looney on Canavan anyway, negating the idea.
When they went to face Nemo Rangers 31 years ago, it was pre-internet and Errigal Ciaran had only just been formed.
Dinny Allen admitted before the game that he knew virtually nothing about their opponents and their star forward Colin Corkery was mid-sentence in an interview with UTV when he completely forgot the club’s name, and could not locate it rattling around in his brain.
By the end of it, they knew who Errigal Ciaran were.
Corkery’s two 50-metre frees, both controversial awards by Brian White, dragged the game to extra-time, where the Cork men “got out of hell,” as Allen called it.
Errigal and Dr Crokes will pretty much everything there is to know about each other now.
Enda McGinley will, for instance, have a plan for when Kieran O’Leary comes on. He’s come off the bench in their last seven games and scored 1-8. He was no sooner off it against Castlehaven, mere seconds, than he’d sneaked into a pocket of space and kicked a crucial point.
They’ll know the three goals in the Kerry final were an outlier. Crokes have only scored another four in the rest of their championship campaign, none in their last two outings, and their goal against Castlehaven was from a penalty.
They’ll know that Shane Murphy has made big saves at crucial junctures, and that Crokes will give up space on the break and goal chances.
Errigal will know that Munster has produced just two senior All-Ireland winners this century and that Crokes six years ago were the last team from the province to win a semi-final.
And they will know that Crokes, like themselves, have an in-built inoculation against such statistics.
Their record when they get out of Kerry transcends Munster’s norm, particularly when it’s Pat O’Shea on the line, just the same way Errigal’s record bucks the Tyrone trend.
This is a glorious opportunity for them to reach a first ever All-Ireland final.
They just might, realistically, have to wait another week to get stuck into it.