“The big emphasis for us all year is our work rate”- Brendan Kenny

By Paul Keane 

When Kilmacud Crokes and Na Fianna started to share out Dublin minor hurling championship titles between them a decade ago, it was a peek into the future.

Between them, the clubs won all seven Minor A titles between 2014 and 2020, Na Fianna initially doing a four-in-a-row between 2014 and 2017 and Crokes then winning the next three.

Brendan Kenny, still in his late teens, smiles when he notes that those wins were a little before his time but he did get a strong sense of the potential within both camps.

Sure enough, they have emerged as the two predominant forces at senior level in recent years and will this Saturday contest a third Go-Ahead county final in four seasons.

Crokes beat Na Fianna in the 2021 and 2022 senior finals, Na Fianna gained a modicum of revenge by knocking Crokes out at the quarter-final stage in 2023, on the way to their first ever senior title, and now they're back again preparing to face eachother in the capital showpiece.

"A few of the lads on the team were saying to me that the whole way up they always ended up playing Na Fianna, at minors, U-16s, the whole lot," said Crokes defender Kenny who acknowledged there are few secrets between the two teams at this stage.

"They've got unbelievable players all around the pitch but especially in their forward line, they have some seriously dangerous forwards, lads who have excelled with Dublin on the inter-county stage. Give them an inch of space and they're going to get a score.

"We know the threats they have, we know they're an extremely hard working team. We know we have to match that intensity that they bring and hopefully bring even more again."

When the sides met most recently, in Group 1 of this year's Go-Ahead sponsored championship, the match ended in a draw, Crokes scoring 0-23 to Na Fianna's 3-14.

Crokes also drew with Lucan in the group stage but still topped the table overall and it meant a month until their next outing. That was a county semi-final against Lucan, again, and this time they won by 2-23 to 1-13.

For Kenny, who played for the Dublin U-20s this year, it was a clear sign that they'd put the intervening period to good use and tidied up the areas of their game that required improvement.

"It gave us a good chance to put in a tough block of training and to fix some of the problems that we had," said Kenny of the break in games for them. 

"We're not perfect of course but we have definitely improved. We worked at closing the game out in the semi-final. We made sure that we weren't going to give Lucan a sniff in the last 10 minutes. I think we did that quite well. It's going to take a much better performance now against Na Fianna."

Defensively, Crokes will have to be on their guard because when it comes to the scoring range of Na Fianna forwards like Donal Burke and the Curries, particularly from placed balls, it extends right back into the opposition's half.

"That's something we've definitely discussed, discipline is going to be a massive thing," said Kenny. "We know we have to be careful there."

Likewise, Na Fianna will be aware of the threat of a Crokes side with its own arsenal of attacking talent. From the threat posed by Fergal Whitely, Oisin O'Rorke, Ronan Hayes and Alex Considine, to the ability of Brian Hayes to cause real damage with hard runs through the centre, it has the potential to be a cracker.

"I suppose the big emphasis for us, something we definitely have a big emphasis on all year is our work rate," said Kenny. 

"One of the lads was saying that when we don't work hard, we're an average team. We're only a good team when we work hard and that's probably something that we've all lived by this year. Just being confident in ourselves that if we work hard that our own ability will be able to pull us through games.

"But without that work rate, we're a bang average team and we know that. We have the players so it's just about playing smart. And look, Na Fianna are a tough team, a physical team. Our forwards are going to have to be really sharp because the Na Fianna backs won't make it easy for them. We know that."