Kerry side, Keel, suffered some heartbreak the last time they entered the Munster JFC back in 2007. They lost to eventual All-Ireland winners, Canovee, despite being nine points up at one stage.
Club secretary, Brendan Prendergast, believed that they figured out what went wrong for the side that day and had since learned the error of their ways.
Ahead of the Munster JFC final against Limerick's Feohanagh-Castlemahon at the weekend he told the Irish Independent:
There was a carnival atmosphere after we won Kerry that year. We let the girlfriends and wives travel on the bus. We nearly did it – we built up a nine-point lead with the wind at one stage but we got caught in the end. Our heads just weren't in the right place.
That was great but we decided there would be no sideshows and no distractions this year. The lads have been completely professional. If inter-county teams are doing more than these lads I'll eat my hat.
There'll be no distractions this time. The only people that will be on the bus this time will be the players
Keel beat the the Limerick side by ten points yesterday.
It's hard to tell how much of a mitigating factor banning the wives and girlfriends from the team bus actually was to the team performance. Though I would say it was somewhere close to negligible, zero, zilch, nada and it was more likely that the inter-county-like training made the difference.
