All-Ireland SFC Semi-final/Kerry v Cork: Keith Duggan finds that the Cork footballers never surrendered to Kerry, even during the Kingdom's glory days

'The old memory isn't the best. It was a fair while ago now," laughed Declan Barron when asked about the 1975 Munster final between Cork and Kerry. But the Bantry man remembered all right. Preparing for that afternoon, Cork were reigning Munster champions and had claimed a famous, long-awaited All-Ireland two Septembers previously.

Little was known about Kerry other than that they were ferociously young and had in Mick O'Dwyer a bright, ambitious trainer who had impressed with the county under-21 team. But Cork were heavily tipped to win.

"I don't think any Cork football team has ever taken a Kerry side for granted," Barron says now. "Given the kind of rivalry between the counties over the years, you automatically expected to get a strong game from Kerry. They were young that day all right and perhaps we were surprised at how good they were. But that was the first time that people really saw the team that people called the best ever."

After the winning of an acceptable two All-Ireland titles during the particularly football-rich 1960s, football in Kerry faltered a little after they duly celebrated the inception of the 1970s with another winning September. It wasn't as if there was a sudden scarcity of footballers, but in the cyclical nature of county teams, there was a void between a venerated senior group of players bowing out and a new generation coming into maturation.

"I played with Mick O'Connell very early in my career," remembers John O'Keeffe, "and a lot of those men - the likes of Donie O'Sullivan, Mick O'Dwyer, Pat Griffin and Seán Murphy, God rest him - had had enough. It was an ageing team. It was beginning to show. We were beaten in the Munster final of 1971, an All-Ireland final replay by Offaly in 1972, the Munster final against Cork in 1973 and again in 1974.

"When that happens in Kerry, something has to change. From my own perspective, I had also been beaten in three minor finals by Cork teams so there was a time when I was beginning to wonder what we had to do to beat these fellas in red. But in 1975 we were suddenly in the situation where the team was exceptionally young. I was 24 and I was the senior player, I think the eldest on the team.

"And O'Dwyer came in with a training regime that seemed incredible at the time. I had trained with Johnny Culloty before and while those sessions were very enjoyable, they were the old style and were fairly mild in comparison to what we went through in 1975.

"But the thing was that practically every other county was still adhering to the old, conventional habits of a couple of evenings a week and a game on Sunday. In fairness to O'Dwyer, he was always very keen on physical fitness, but even so the sessions were very driven. Perhaps he was spurred on by hearing rumours about what Kevin Heffernan was doing with Dublin.

"But I think, for the most part, other counties - and Cork - didn't realise how fiercely we were training. And we knew we were developing well as a team going into the 1975 championship, but no one in their wildest dreams would have predicted what happened."

THE GENESIS of the Kerry transformation lay in the exceptional under-21 team that represented the county in 1973. Their imminence and impatience hastened a slew of retirements - 12 of the Kerry team which lost the 1972 All-Ireland replay to Offaly bowed out following that afternoon (O'Dwyer and O'Connell were effectively retiring for the second time, having made a popular comeback in the mid-60s).

After a perfunctory 3-13 to 0-9 victory over Tipperary, Kerry hosted Cork in Killarney and a crowd of 43,000 showed up to see the home team reclaim provincial bragging rights with a performance marked for its ravenous speed. The final score was 1-14 to 0-7.

This was an illustrious era for Cork football, whose minor teams claimed a stunning five All-Ireland titles in 10 years so that, by the early 1970s, the county was abundant with celebrated names such as Billy Morgan, Jimmy Barry-Murphy, Barron, Ray Cummins, Kevin Jer O'Sullivan and Jimmy Barrett. Nemo Rangers had beaten St Vincent's in the All-Ireland club final of 1973 and that summer, Cork did not just defeat Kerry in Munster, they pulverised them on a score of 5-12 to 1-15 (this was in the era of 80-minute games).

That September, they won a flowing final against Galway by 3-17 to 2-13, their first All-Ireland since 1945 and a victory that seemed to give them a platform from which they could cope with the Kerry football machine. All that work and certainty was swept away that afternoon in Killarney.

Kerry duly dispatched Sligo in the All-Ireland semi-final and, on a wet day in Croke Park, squared up against Dublin in the beginning of a rivalry that took a boundless grip on the popular imagination for the rest of the decade.

The Kerry-Dublin relationship was simultaneously epic and reductive. Such was the charisma of those teams and managers and the drama of the matches that unfolded that time has illuminated their importance and popular appeal.

But such was their dominance that it was as though other counties simply disappeared off the radar. Cork were among the chief casualties. Including 1975, Cork lost eight Munster finals in a row to the Kingdom. It effectively meant there was a generation worth of Cork footballers whose experience was based on losing provincial finals against the same team.

"It got incredibly frustrating, but you could never show the white feather, not against Kerry," says Barron, who played on right through those years until 1982. "We were probably a bit unlucky one or two years. In 1976 we took them to extra time in Páirc Uí Chaoimh and in 1978 we ran them close as well, but we just couldn't seem to find a way of unlocking them. And naturally, when you are getting beaten like that year after year, the heads will go down a bit."

1976 was the defining year. Cork led by seven points in the last quarter of the match when Kerry were awarded a controversial goal after defender Brian Murphy was deemed to have blocked a shot behind his own goal-line. Just after that, Barron fisted what seemed like a perfectly good goal but was disallowed for a square ball - and with Corkonians apoplectic, Kerry fired over four points to level matters.

As it happened, Mikey Sheehy had connected with what would have been the winning point had the referee, John Maloney, not whistled for full time before it reached the posts. But Kerry were too strong in extra time anyway.

"I hold that Cork would have stood a great chance of winning the All-Ireland title that year if they had survived the onslaught of misfortune that day," wrote Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh, then a Kerry trainer, in his recent autobiography, From Dún Síon to Croke Park. "The memory of the 1974 semi-final defeat by Dublin would have helped their cause and only the sight of Kerry would have motivated Dublin to the level they attained in the All-Ireland final of that year."

It is a fascinating theory and so revered is the Dublin-Kerry period now that the notion of Cork cropping up in the midst of it seems almost blasphemous. But it could well have happened and then, who knows, the whole trajectory of the Dublin-Kerry rivalry might have been diffused.

As O'Keeffe recalls, Kerry never failed to prepare with the utmost diligence for Cork.

"There was always a great pride in Cork football. They really made an effort to have the same kind of profile as the hurlers, and the club game there was very strong. They had too many good players for us to be casual about it. Declan Barron was one of the best I ever marked and I remember one year, their forward line was Barron, Jimmy Barry and Dinny Allen. But it must have been very disheartening after a few years and I have to say, winning Munster finals did seem to get easier as the years went on."

GIVEN KERRY'S omnipotence, Cork had suffered such periods under the cosh before. After 1909, they went 35 years without beating Kerry. It wasn't until 1945, when the legendary Collins Barracks Army members, Eamon Young, Mick Tubridy, "Togher" Casey, Caleb Crone and Moll Driscoll, backboned a fine team that included Jack Lynch. By the 1950s and 1960s, Cork were consistently challenging for Munster honours and, by 1973, when they took the Sam Maguire home to the Lee, nobody could have predicted they were on the verge of another black hole.

That, of course, was down to Kerry's unprecedented quality and invincibility. It is a quiet testimony to Cork football that they did not succumb to despair altogether.

"If you look at the history of Cork football," observes O'Keeffe, "the club culture was always very strong and that remained the case even in that period. They were always capable of fielding good teams."

Nonetheless, eight provincial championships in a row for Kerry meant much of the steam was taken out of the provincial championship. By 1983, only 17,000 turned up in Páirc Uí Chaoimh to see how the local boys would fare against a Kerry team who had come within two minutes of an historic five All-Irelands in a row the previous September.

Séamus Darby's plain and thunderous strike instantly became one of the most famous feats in GAA history and maybe subconsciously delivered the message to Cork footballers that their neighbours were not unbeatable. In any event, Tadhg Murphy caused more localised shock waves with his own last-minute goal and, all of a sudden, the hex was over.

"Relief," says Declan Barron, who was watching in the stands that day. "After so many years, it gave us a huge lift."

It took another six years before Cork had returned to the starting point of 1973, champions of the land with Billy Morgan back at the helm. And although Cork have not won a Munster title since 1999, the qualifying system has been an emancipation, ensuring that never again will they have to suffer anything like the long, dark period of impotence that went with Kerry's most sumptuous football era. Even when they cannot best Kerry in Munster, there is always the spur of a second chance.

And so tomorrow, the tribes gather in Croke Park for the Munster final, mark two.