Fossa are senior at last after four seasons of climbing, falling and coming back again
Two lost intermediate finals might have stalled plenty of clubs. Fossa kept coming back. Their victory over Kilcummin has now taken the Kerry club from Premier Junior champions to the senior grade in four seasons.
Three intermediate finals in four seasons is either evidence that a team belongs at a higher level, or a particularly cruel way of being reminded that it hasn’t got there yet.
Fossa finally settled that argument on Sunday.
A 0-26 to 0-22 victory over Kilcummin at Fitzgerald Stadium gave the club the Kerry Intermediate Football Championship and senior status for the first time in its history. David Clifford scored 0-15 and Paudie Clifford added 0-4 as Fossa finally made the breakthrough.
The temptation is obvious.
Another Fossa story becomes another David Clifford story.
There have been plenty of them.
This one deserves a little more room.
Four seasons that changed Fossa
Go back to November 2022 and Fossa were trying to escape Kerry’s Premier Junior grade.
They needed extra-time against Listry at Fitzgerald Stadium. David Clifford kicked 2-12, Paudie contributed 1-2, and Fossa won 4-15 to 0-22.
Promotion to intermediate football was secured.
They didn’t stop there.
A few weeks later Fossa beat Cork champions Kilmurry 1-17 to 1-6 to win the Munster Junior Championship, before the journey eventually reached Croke Park in January 2023.
Stewartstown Harps provided the opposition in an All-Ireland Junior final remembered partly for its six red cards, but also for another enormous Clifford performance. Fossa won 0-19 to 1-13 and became All-Ireland champions.
It would have been easy to assume the next promotion would follow almost automatically.
It didn’t.
And that’s where the more interesting part of the story begins.
The bit between the trophies
Fossa reached the Kerry Intermediate final in their first season at the grade.
Milltown-Castlemaine beat them by a single point in 2023, 2-13 to 0-18, after Clifford missed a difficult late free that would have levelled the game.
They returned to the final in 2025.
This time An Ghaeltacht beat them 0-19 to 1-11. Fossa again found themselves watching somebody else leave with the trophy.
Two finals. Two defeats.
For a club containing two of the most recognisable Gaelic footballers in Ireland, that was useful evidence of something occasionally forgotten when people talk about club football.
Inter-county reputation does not grant anybody a pass.
The Kerry club championships are too competitive for that.
A great player can alter a game. He can’t remove all the awkward afternoons, difficult match-ups and teams who have spent the week figuring out how to stop him.
Fossa had to earn the promotion the same way everyone else does.
2026 left little doubt
Their championship numbers before Sunday’s final suggested a team increasingly comfortable at this level.
Fossa won all three of their 2026 Intermediate Championship group matches and finished top of their group. They then beat Listowel Emmets 1-19 to 2-12 in the quarter-final before surviving an extraordinary semi-final against Beaufort, winning 2-25 to 2-24. The route through the competition can be checked in the official Kerry GAA fixtures and results.
Kilcummin weren’t accidental finalists either.
They had also won all three group matches before defeating Ballymacelligott in the quarter-final and Glenflesk after extra-time in the semi-final.
That made Sunday’s final a fairly honest test of the two strongest records in the competition.
Fossa passed it.
And there is something fitting about Fitzgerald Stadium being the place where the promotion finally happened.
It was there that the club won the Premier Junior title in 2022 and began this particular climb. Four seasons later, they returned to finish it.
Bigger than two surnames
Nobody sensible is going to pretend the Cliffords are incidental to all of this.
David Clifford is one of the defining footballers of his generation. Paudie has been central to the club’s progress in his own right.
When Fossa win, they’re generally somewhere near the middle of the story.
But there is a difference between recognising that and pretending Fossa amount to two players wearing red and black.
Club football has a useful way of exposing that kind of oversimplification.
Somebody still has to defend.
Somebody has to win dirty possession.
Somebody has to make the run that never appears in the scoring statistics.
Somebody has to organise training on a miserable Tuesday evening when there is no television camera nearby.
And somebody has to come back after losing another county final.
That last one matters here.
Fossa didn’t breeze from junior football to senior football in one uninterrupted celebration. They got close, lost, got close again, lost again, and went back at it.
That’s a much more recognisable GAA story.
What comes next?
Senior status changes the question.
Fossa are no longer the ambitious intermediate club with two extraordinary Kerry players trying to force their way upwards.
They’ve arrived.
The challenge now is staying there and finding out what this group looks like against Kerry’s established senior clubs.
That should be considerably more interesting than asking whether David Clifford can score heavily at another level.
We already know the answer to that one.
The question worth following is how far Fossa can go with him.
And, after four seasons of trying to reach the next floor, they finally get to find out.
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