Moments before Saturday’s Gregor Cameron Celtic Society Cup final got underway in scenic Taynuilt, well known former referee Dunky Kerr made his regular visit to the commentary box to wish the Hugh Dan MacLennan well in his afternoon’s work, the pair comparing notes on the competing sides, with Dunky questioning the sanity of one of the Kyles players who had recently suffered two broken fingers.
As he departed Hugh Dan drily observed: “That’s his son he’s talking about,” before setting to his task.
Little more than five minutes later the voice of shinty was describing the opening goal scored, of course, by the younger Dunky Kerr as the team from just along the road were made to pay for failing to clear their lines, having had two or three opportunities to do so.
On their way to a fifth successive win in this competition, a sixth in seven years and an extension of their record haul of Celtic Cup wins to 34 in all as they also maintained an unbeaten record in all competitions this season, they were to dominate the remainder of the half without adding to their advantage.
However just 39 seconds of the second half had elapsed when any good work done in the Oban team talk was undone when Kerr made a clever run across his marker to allow Thomas Whyte to feed him a pass which allowed him, from close range, to slip the ball past Gavin Stobbart, the opposing goal-keeper and provide his side with something of a cushion.
His opportunism was stop earn him the man of the match award, yet he was to reveal afterwards that coping with damaged digits had been far from his greatest concern ahead of the match.
“I did it playing for the second team six weeks ago, so they’ve been all right for a couple of weeks, but getting back into the team was the hardest thing because it’s a big squad with everybody playing well,” Kerr explained.
“I’ve been quite lucky, we’ve had a couple of injuries there in the last couple of weeks and I took my chance, because three or four weeks ago there was no chance I was going to play this week.
“Last week was my first game back and Innes MacDonald suffered a broken ankle so that was how I got back in the team and kept my place.”
His contribution of both goals in that Artemis Macaulay Cup win during which fellow forward Innes MacDonald had broken his ankle had helped earn his place in the starting line-up for the final, but such is the nature of shinty that his had not been the most dramatic recovery from injury even within the Kyles forward line.
That honour surely belongs to Roddy MacDonald, brother of Innes, who is their top goal scorer but had not started the previous week’s match after he had a momentary lapse of concentration during his work as a mechanic.
“At work I was drilling and I dropped it on my leg last week, so I got a couple of stitches. It wasn’t my brightest move. It was just careless,” he chirpily reported.
“When I was going to the hospital I was a bit worried I might miss out on this and I was a sub last weekend, but my brother got injured so I had to come on. I played 70 minutes and I was all right. I think adrenaline gets you through.”
That and the various sprays he was liberally applying during the half-time interval when, since he was also nursing a shoulder injury suffered after both he and Kerr were upended by a frantically retreating defender whose recklessness merited not so much as a rebuke from officialdom, let alone a penalty, one of several strong claims from both sides that were to be turned down.
Such was MacDonald’s apparent discomfort that the commentary team were sceptical about his chances of playing much of the second period. Sixty four minutes in, then and the third Kyles goal came as a result of his sharpness when Sandy Mackenzie’s shot rebounded off the shins of Stobbart.
The half-time between Hugh Dan and co-commentator Stewart Mackenzie had also taken in their views on the prospect of the gifted Daniel Cameron, who had been tasked with marking MacDonald in the opening half, moving forward as and when the need arose for his team. Any prospect of that happening looked to be removed from the his coach’s options when, clad in a helmet but without a face guard, from a range of a couple of yards his left eye took the full force of a sweetly struck ball, leaving him in clear distress as he left the field.
Given all else that had taken place, Holmesian powers of deduction would not be required to identify the name of the scorer of the game’s best goal, an Oban consolation strike scored 11 minutes from the end, some 14 minutes after Cameron had returned to the fray, the deftness of his stick work in latching onto Scott MacMillan’s speculative ball into the D, defying the stickiness of the pitch that was a result of a sequence of fierce squalls.
They breed them tough in shinty land.
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