Dr Crokes is a huge part of Eoin Brosnan's life but he still has goals to strive for with Kerry too, writes MALACHY CLERKIN

ON THE night of a lost All- Ireland final, all promises come with a statute of limitations attached. Loose tongues and looser tempers tend to write cheques that won’t all be cashed over time. It’s just the way of things, the natural humanity of it all, and nobody ever holds it against you in the morning.

Eoin Brosnan meant what he said though. Deep into the night in the D4 Hotel in Ballsbridge after Kerry lost to Dublin in September, he was telling clubmen of his that they had to go and win a second county title in a row over the following couple of months. For themselves, for each other but above all for the man who had been seven minutes away from lifting Sam.

Another title would mean Dr Crokes would nominate the Kerry captain for 2012 and it followed that Colm Cooper would be reappointed unopposed if it came to pass.

“Everyone was down that night, Colm especially,” says 31-year-old Brosnan. “It was a big disappointment for him and his family and for the club as well. We take great pride in him as a player and having him captain Kerry was a proud day for us all. I remember saying that night that we knew we were good enough to compete for another county championship but now we had a bigger reason.

“We had to drive on and get Colm up again as captain for next year. That was the one thing we said that night – we had to get Colm the chance to go one better.

“Colm is our best player, he’s been Kerry’s best player for a good few years now and everyone was behind him the whole year. The whole county was on the one wavelength to try to get success.

“Nobody is entitled to win an All-Ireland and nobody is entitled to be the man who lifts the cup. You’ve got to earn it, we all know that. But I don’t think there’s anyone in the country who doesn’t objectively enjoy watching Colm Cooper in full flight.

“So it would have been nice to do it for him. But we’ll regroup now over the winter and try to do it for him again next year.”

Brosnan himself will be back to try and do it alongside him. Although he was originally only coming back to play with Kerry for one season, he’s willing to throw himself into it again next year. On the face of it, this is odd.

When he walked away from the intercounty scene in 2008, it was because he’d had enough of the stress, enough of the commitment, enough of being a Kerry player who played for the Crokes rather than a Crokes man who played for Kerry. The terms and conditions haven’t changed in the meantime and with his wife expecting their second child in January to go along with 2½-year-old Annie, there wouldn’t have been a word said if he’d taken his life back for good.

But the truth is, it’s too much fun to leave behind. There’s too much glory in it, too much that’s good for the soul. We’re sitting in his office in Killarney on the most vile, sodden November day you could conjure up. If a man is faced with endless winters like the one outside for the rest of his life, he’s nearly duty-bound to take whatever summer has on the table for him right now.

The couple of years he took off from the county team opened a valve and let out some steam. Did him a world of good. It kick-started the appetite again, reminded him what he enjoyed about the life in the first place. He threw himself into the club and set standards in training when the county lads were away. He’s been a Kerry player since his teens and had never been able to give the Crokes the full undivided before. So he made up for lost time.

“I felt I owed them,” he says. “I did, yeah. You always enjoy playing with the club when you’re a county player but it’s obvious that the fellas left behind get a raw deal out of it. You’re not training with them, or of you are you’re just coming down to kick a few balls and maybe do a few stretches. It’s tough on them.

“There were five of us training with the county this summer and that left them very short in the club. Take the five of us out and then take fellas heading off to the States or New Zealand or wherever during the summer and throw in a few injuries and you were left with a core of maybe eight or nine fellas who were going training each night. It’s very difficult to do quality sessions with that. They were playing county league games and getting beaten and they were getting annoyed and that’s totally understandable.”

His time away from the county team coincided with a huge fundraising drive in the club and the building of state-of-the-art facilities as a result.

Which was all well and good and very worthy but without a county title to go alongside them, they were a tough sell within the town. Crokes had won in 2000 but since then had lost in the final in ’05, ’06 and ’09. Even a Munster club title in ’06 – when they were put forward as the county’s representatives after losing to South Kerry in the final – didn’t make up for an otherwise barren decade.

“I think for a while there,” says Brosnan, “people might have been saying we were spending nearly too much time on fundraising and not enough winning county titles.

“But we’re reaping the rewards now. We have great facilities and a fine gym where everybody is on programmes and everybody is getting stronger. The seniors have won two titles in a row now, we’ve a good minor team, the under-21s won the county championship this year for the second time ever. There’s a good base there and the challenge is to keep it at that level.”

Spoken like the future club chairman that some folk in Killarney have him marked down as – but that’s for down the road. For now, he’s getting a kick out of being a man among boys and laughing at how at just 31, he’s already disappearing over the hill in the eyes of half the players he’ll line out with tomorrow. After Ireland’s draw against Estonia on Tuesday night, he was talking about next summer with one of the younger kids on the panel but soon realised they were having different conversations on the same topic. He was looking forward by looking back, whereas they were just looking forward.

“It was gas,” he says. “They have no memory of Euro ’88 or Italia ’90. A fair few of them weren’t born or were only toddlers at the time. Whereas for me, those are clear and significant memories from my own life and now I’m playing on the same team as fellas who weren’t even born for them.”

Still, it works. After a decade without a county title, they’ve put together back-to-back crowns for the first time in 97 years. Cooper will be Kerry captain next year so that’s the first job done but there’s more to achieve now, starting with Kilmurry-Ibrickane tomorrow. Within the club, they can feel a winter up ahead that’s theirs for the enjoying.

“Last year was elation, this year was satisfaction,” he says. “After we won the semi-final against West Kerry, there was no sense of elation. We were more disappointed with the performance the day before, which is a good sign. We had a meeting on the Monday night saying, ‘Look, this is our third final in a row and that’s a real achievement but it means nothing if we don’t win it.’ We won it and now we’re in the Munster club and I feel we’re finding better fluidity with every game.

“This is a great competition that I used always look at and see Kerry teams do well in – teams we would have felt that we were well capable of beating. We’re in it now and we have our chance.”

Take it he won’t spare the sinews in pursuit of it.