Sport

Lisard Wanderers are an up and coming new club

Lisard Wanderers is a small club from the hinterland of Tralee which has been making waves since it entered the KDL four years ago. The idea to form a club came from a few lads that had been playing together with each other over a period of time.

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New blood is just what hurlers needed

It's not that he was breaking new ground exactly. Hurling has a proud tradition in that part of the world. He's far from the first man from the south of the county to line out for the Kingdom's hurlers, and yet, the presence of Fionán O'Sullivan on the starting fifteen last Sunday can't be looked at as anything other than a positive thing. A sign more of rebirth than of revolution.

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O'Rahilly family back on track with dose of Realism

The O'Rahilly family out Ballymacelligott way (Knockeen to be exact) didn't have any lofty ambitions for a greyhound called Realism whey they acquired him from the Tipperary kennels of Owen McKenna, even though the patriarch of the family, Roger O'Rahilly, who, sadly, died recently, won the Irish Laurels in 1981 with Knockeen Master. However, Realism has turned out to be an absolute gem for the O'Rahilly family and he has become the leading fancy in the €7,000-to-the-winner Lee Strand A3 550 Sweepstake at Tralee Track.

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Leen aims high for career and county

It was a nice reminder that everything, absolutely everything, is a matter of perspective.

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'Wrong and unfair': Keane critical of counties that broke rules

Kerry football manager Peter Keane has said that it was "wrong" and "unfair" for those county teams that breached the collective training ban in the last few months to do so. He also said that stories of other counties engaging in collective training sessions when not permitted to do so put pressure on his players who might have felt they were losing ground to those teams breaching the training ban.

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John Griffin: Good to be back talking about hurling

In a previous role as a hurling development administrator in the county I always made the point that for hurling to really develop in an area it must be spoken about at the 'breakfast table'.

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There's no doubt the management is under pressure to win Sam Maguire this season

And we go again, the 2021 season is about to get underway. This time around, the season begins with a long stretch in the evenings, warmer weather, freshly cut grass and the surroundings of Fitzgerald Stadium. It was always my favourite time of the year as a player - that pre Championship feel. All the indicators that championship is getting very close but this year, it is actually only the beginning of the Allianz National League.

Keane says Kerry will be 'poking in the dark' against Galway on the opening weekend

At the best of times, and in normal times, GAA managers can be, at best, coy about giving anything away with regard to team selections, match-day squads, player availability or unavailability and all that factual stuff, ahead of any fixture.

Adams and Sheehy honoured in the KABB annual awards

Like all sports basketball is delighted to see the return to players on the courts, albeit only outdoors at the moment, with contact games back from this week. Everyone involved in the basketball clubs in Kerry are now hoping that they can get back indoors and run their annual competitions which tip-off later in the year.

Resounding victory after shaky start puts Kerry on right path

Once they got up to speed, boy was it a sight to see. It was the Kerry team a lot of us had come to know from last year, playing the type of hurling we've come to expect of them. Clever lines of running, incisive distribution of the ball and, yes, a certain ruthlessness in front of the sticks when the mood took them.

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Keane and Kerry set out for the summit again

It would have been a perfect metaphor if it hadn't been so bloody real. And painful. Six months on and Peter Keane can talk freely about the accident that saw him stretchered down from Ireland's highest mountain and taken to Kerry University Hospital for surgery on a dislocated shoulder...a day after Kerry were dumped out of the Munster championship by Cork by that goal. Talk about adding injury to insult.

Hard-to-call crunch contest as injuries take their toll on the Kingdom

As we've been saying over the last couple of weeks, they're kind of all crunch games in this year's National Hurling League Division 2A. Why? Because with no league final this year, you have to top the table to secure promotion and the title.

'We have a very resilient group of girls' says Brick

Kerry camogie is an ongoing underdog story, but as Samuel Clemens - better known as Mark Twain - once said, "it's not about the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog".

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Parity the only way forward

Sometimes it's only after a change is made that you realise how ludicrous a situation was before that. Like when the Minster for Sport, Jack Chambers, announced this week that he was going to treble the grants funding for female inter-county Gaelic games players to bring parity with their male counterparts. You can only applaud Mr Chambers for making the call and the commitment, but the more we thought about it the more we were left wondering how did this disparity ever come into being in the first place?

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KDL plan Champions League style tournament for summer

The Kerry District League will run a Champions League style tournament across the summer months for its clubs, having last week declared the 2020/21 season null and void.

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McCarthy 'suspension' makes total mockery of GAA's disciplinary system

On Saturday afternoon next the Cork footballers will run out on to Semple Stadium in Thurles to take on Kildare in their first game of the National League; their first game of the year. And right alongside them will be their manager Ronan McCarthy.

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Teams must extract maximum value out of themselves in mini League

The four weeks between the resumption of collective training and the first games of the National League will have been all about an easing back into it, or at least it should have been. The received wisdom is that players should have been building themselves up gently in terms of full fitness, contact sessions and game sharpness, and that the smart management team will have been facilitating the return to play in a measured way, rather than trying to cram four missed months into the last four weeks.

Galway favourites as Kingdom will hope to hit the ground running

First up for Kerry is Galway, and nobody's giving out prizes for guessing who is going to be the hot favourite here. As a big clue, let me point out that last year we played Galway's second string in the National League ..... and lost by 2-12 to 0-0.

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Better late than never as O'Connor discovers hurling

You can call it the ebullience of youth. Maybe it's also the innocence that cannot be seen in those of an older and more grizzled vintage. The sheer sense of enjoyment in doing what he's doing is there for all to see. To put it simply, Tomás O'Connor is an absolute breath of fresh air.

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Nagle will miss Sicilian event due to quarantine protocols

Paul Nagle will miss this weekend's Targa Florio Rally because Italy remains on the Irish mandatory quarantine list.

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Hurling no longer without sin(bin)

In an odd sort of way the fact nothing was happening for the last couple of months almost deadened us to some things of consequence which actually did happen in the sporting desert that was the first four months of the year.

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Shorter League leaves less room for error

It is fitting that the reigning Allianz League champions will be the first into action when inter-county football action resumes on Saturday week - just 29 weeks since the League cup was handed over in late October - and while spectators won't be allowed attend any GAA fixtures for the foreseeable, there will be huge excitement from all vested groups when Kerry run out against Galway in Austin Stack Park just before three o'clock on May 15.

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John 'Tweek' Griffin joins The Kerryman's winning team

Today The Kerryman is delighted and excited to announce that John Griffin has joined our sports team as our resident hurling analyst.

Founding member McCarthy is still at heart of the Kilmoyley club

James McCarthy is one of the unsung heroes of the club as he was one of the founder members of the club back in 1993 and was one of the people involved in the reformation of the club back in 2018.

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Fixtures could have a bit been kinder

Yes, yes, we know, we know, beggars can't really be choosers. Not so long ago we would have bitten your hand off for a match... any match ... and yet here we are now with a suite of fixtures to take us deep into the summer months, and we're left to conclude that they could have been a touch kinder to the Kingdom.

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Kneejerk reaction ruled out after Mac Final loss

Time, they say, is the great healer, and that being the case, with nothing but time on our hands for months and months, surely any lingering wounds from last December's Joe McDonagh Cup final defeat at the hands of Antrim would well and truly be healed by now.

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Now the expectation is to win silverware

Let's get it out there from the very beginning: expectations are high for this Kerry team in 2021. They expect to have some sort of silverware at the end of this season. A good pre-season, along with losing the Joe McDonagh Cup final, has, by all accounts, the players chomping at the bit for the season to get started.

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Paul Brennan: No crowds might be no bad thing as players find their feet

At 9.47am on Tuesday morning the work email flashed to signal an incoming. It came from Siobhan Brady in the GAA's Communications Department and the attached PDF said: GAA Fixtures 08-09.05.2021. Believe us when we say we know exactly how Charlie felt when he pulled back the wrapper on his Wonka bar and found the last golden ticket to the chocolate factory.

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June 13 for county leagues as clubs resume on Monday

Club footballers and hurlers in Kerry will be back playing competitive games on the weekend of June 12 and 13 with the county leagues scheduled to start then.

Johnny Hickey remembered on Rally of the Lakes 'spin'

Killarney and District Motor Club marked what should have been the final day of the 2021 running of the Rally of the Lakes by organising a road run over some of the county's favourite rally roads last Sunday.