GAELIC GAMES:Despite winning three All-Irelands from four seasons managing the Kerry senior footballers, Jack O'Connor tells TOM HUMPHRIEShe is still on a learning curve
THE DAYS dwindle and Jack O’Connor’s burden lightens. The pressure cooker afternoons of high summer are never further away than at this time of the year when Christmas crowds the schedule and the team holiday (New York and then Jamaica) awaits.
In Kerry, of course, the pressure is like the weather. Sometimes it is fine and sometimes it is bad but always it is there. Kerry have 19 or 20 development players working away on their own programme devised by Ger Hartmann.
They’ll get to audition in the McGrath Cup. They have the farewells to Tommy Walsh and Tadgh Kennelly still ringing in the air and despite an astonishing consistency in the last decade they have questions, questions and questions to answer.
Five of the defence are the regretful side of 30. Two of the attack are Down Under. Tyrone remain elusive. Darragh Ó Sé may come or Darragh Ó Sé may go. Kieran Donaghy will be back but will he fulfil his destiny and become one of the great Kerry full forwards or will his blossoming have been short and sweet.
Listen, can they keep the whole bloody show on the road? In Kerry there is no such thing as transition. There are All-Ireland winning years and the years in between. These years are known simply as bad years.
He is out walking today. Beloved turf of south Kerry. Jack frost snapping at his toes. Kerry’s eternal sense of expectation snapping at his ass.
He draws breath. It has been a good year, a very good year. All-Irelands came pouring into the O’Connor house. Cian with St Michael’s Foilmore in February. Eanna with the school, Coláiste na Sceilge in April and Jack managing the seniors in September.
His third senior All-Ireland at the helm. A 75 per cent success rate in terms of tilts at the canister.
Kerry have been in the last six All-Ireland finals. O’Connor has led them to four of those. Surely it is time for man and county to draw breath.
Maybe but just a very quick one.
“Yeah,” he says, pondering the habits of his own tribe, “people don’t realise what it takes out of a team to be on the road as long as these fellas. The mental baggage that goes with being in six All-Irelands in a row is huge. I was thinking there the other day Gooch (Colm Cooper) has played in seven All-Irelands in eight years. He is in his mid-20. That is massive.
“He has never known anything else but high pressure games till the end of the year. All-Ireland finals and then on in to December in local championships he is playing in the O’Donoghue Cup final tomorrow. That’s well into December. Year in and year out.”
Last year the Kerry boys got the winter holiday and came back in time to get two weeks’ training before the league started. The secondary competition is condensed and intense now and before they knew it they had gone all the way and were facing Cork at the gates of summer.
“We played Cork on the seventh of June. Very early for us, so the result was not a huge surprise to me. We couldn’t match them for legs. Having had the experience of 2006 I wasn’t too perturbed after that game but we knew we would have to do a fair bit of rejigging.
“We hadn’t the volume in our legs that was needed. Cork had more done, a training camp, etc. We couldn’t match that.”
The bit of rejigging, as they described it at the garage, turned out to be the fitting of a new engine. He recalls against Cork seeing John Miskella play a harmless ball toward the Kerry goal and watching it bounce before the ensuing play yielded Cork a penalty. They knew then they needed a full back who would attack every such ball for the rest of the summer. Come on down Tommy Griffin.
So it went. Mike McCarthy was talked back into the fold and he took the number-six jersey where his athleticism was unfettered. Anthony Maher a star on the heavy grounds of spring was cheated by injury of the chance to uncoil himself at the summer. But Darragh Ó Sé declined to age and if he had come back to the panel as a bit player he was commanding centre stage with his usual majesty by August.
Tadgh Kennelly came in on the forty and Declan O’Sullivan moved to full forward. Kieran Donaghy lingered in the infirmary, injured all summer.
It was a remarkable All-Ireland for any team to have garnered but a team which has been motoring non stop for a decade had no right to do this. O’Connor pulled out every trick in the book to keep them interested.
He hates the comfort zone the way some people despise sun holidays and he stoked little disputes and grievances all summer to keep the edge alive.
He reflects admiringly on the number of plaudits and gongs coming the way of John Oxx in this the awards season. Then laughs. Give me horses any day!
John Oxx doesn’t have to keep reinventing himself in the stable yard every morning to satisfy all the long faces drooped over the half doors.
“There is no question that you have to keep reinventing yourself. Early in the year I wasn’t as hands on as previous years. Eamon Fitz would have done a good few of the drills. My input was only very spasmodic. In the qualifiers I got fairly well stuck in but every year you have to reinvent yourself and come back with different ideas and different drills.
“This summer we did the lot. We changed hotels, we switched training techniques. Altered the drills and the entire way we trained. We did a whole lot of different stuff. Familiarity gets you into a rut. You don’t want to be going through the motions with anything.
“As it turned out we never played the same team for two games in a row for league or championship. We emptied the bench for every league and championship game. We told them we would. We did that to avoid complacency. Keep the edge there.
“We felt we had the best panel. Always in our head to use the full bench. Even in the All-Ireland we made changes early. We had plenty of faith in the fellas coming in.
“You have to change the scenario all the time. Make it different. More interesting. Changing the team in the middle of the year gave them a new focus. That is where the fun is. I enjoy stuff like that.”
He found to his surprise that not just was he reinventing himself on a conscious level but that he had changed on a subconscious level too.
"I was more relaxed. Through the book ( Keys to the Kingdom) I think I got a lot of stuff out of the system that needed to be got out. Around the time of the qualifiers we were heading up to Tullamore for that game against Antrim where we had left Tomás and Gooch off the team. My neck was supposedly on the block. I didn't feel it. I was quite relaxed about it.
“By the time the Dublin game came about friends and relations were texting me not to resign no matter what happened. Again it didn’t eat into me at all.”
He concedes that in 2006 he was one very wound-up manager, reacting to everything which occurred as if he had the power to alter the elements with his will.
“I’m a bit more mature now in the sense that I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder at that time. I see the way the system works now. I resented a lot of stuff in 2006. Our own crowd booing us in Páirc Uí Chaoimh. I resented that big time. Hard to take. I don’t care what fellas pay going in.
“If the players and the management were getting paid then they have a right if they want to boo us but I felt it was well out of order. I said if I got my two legs out of that year I would pack it.”
On the issue of the Satanic Verseshe sounded out a few key figures to see it any fatwahs were still extant within the county and as he suspected nobody who mattered really cared that much. Had he detected any significant ill will he wouldn't have gone back in the first place he says. Anything which was said afterwards was muttering from the ditch and not the dressingroom.
“There was flak this year alright. Not about the book but there is always flack in Kerry. When the flak started flying this year I was able to handle it better. No point going down that road beating myself up. You have yahoos in every walk of life and you just have to learn to cope with it. Stick to your guns I told myself. If you listen too much to the lads above in the stand you will be sitting up beside them soon enough.”
He read a few quotes recently from Ger McKenna, the great and wise Kerry administrator who presided over the golden years for Kerry football. Ger was noting how after Kerry’s defeats to Dublin in 1976 and 1977 there was a swell of opinion within the county which demanded that Mick O’Dwyer be made to walk the plank.
“That’s what you are up against in Kerry. Ger made another very valid point. He said that the hurlers on the ditch will condemn you today and praise you tomorrow without accountability. I have learned to ignore it.
“The dressingroom is what counts and if I ever feel I am not getting it out of the players they won’t have to be asking me to go. There will be no sagas or emergency meetings, the minute a proportion of the key players don’t want you that’s when you need to get out of there. Players have to want to play for you. That is critical and you can’t force it.”
He has learned the serenity to accept the things that he cannot change. In the weeks after the All-Ireland an ageing team lost two parts which had long-term viability. Tadgh Kennelly and Tommy Walsh disappeared to Van Diemens’ land radically altering the average age of the remaining panel.
Jack wishes them well, noting that it would be wrong to even begrudge two such fine athletes the chance to fulfil themselves on a professional basis.
“I couldn’t wish it on a nicer fella than Tommy, I worked with him in Strand road. Who would I be to say he couldn’t get paid for doing what he loves.
“Same with Tadghie he came back to fulfil his ambition, achieved it in the first year. His hunger was sated perhaps. It is an amateur game you can’t put heat on fellas I just wish the two of them the best of luck to be honest.”
And their departure in another way keeps it interesting for him. He and his backroom team reckon on replacing four or five of the starting 15 by next summer and making further changes right down through the panel.
For three of O’Connor’s four years in charge of Kerry his side have won the league. For next spring he advises you to keep your money in your pocket were you of a mind to wager on the basis of form. Kerry will be experimenting like flower children in a pharmaceutical factory.
“Next year we will be using the league to get a right good look at fellas who haven’t a lot of football played and for resting a few fellas who have a lot of mileage. Just trying to get the balance right.”
And that’s exciting because in Kerry the supply if not quite endless is reliable. David Moran and Anthony Maher will be expected to resume where loss of form and injury gave them pause last year. Kieran Donaghy of course will be back. Barry John Walsh should challenge in a forward line further weakened by the departure of Seán Bán O’Sullivan.
And so it goes. Jack O’Connor walks on uninhibited by the worries of the world, he has laid down those fretful things which he once carried on his back like a cross. He hasn’t got it all figured out. Far from it but he knows enough to know that he enjoys figuring out. That’s enough learning for any man in the space of a year.
Jack O'Connor's championship record
2004
Munster Quarter-finalKerry 2-10 Clare 0-9
Semi-finalKerry 0-15 Cork 0-7
Final Kerry 1-10Limerick 1-10
Final (replay)Kerry 3-10 Limerick 2-9
All-IrelandQuarter-finalKerry 1-15 Dublin 1-8
Semi-final Kerry 1-17 Derry 1-11
FinalKerry 1-20 Mayo 2-9
2005
Munster Quarter-final Kerry 2-22 Tipperary 0-13
Semi-finalKerry 2-10 Limerick 0-10
FinalKerry 1-11Cork 0-11
All-Ireland Quarter-final Kerry 2-15 Mayo 0-18
Semi-finalKerry 1-19 Cork 0-9
FinalTyrone 1-16 Kerry 2-10
2006
Munster Quarter-finalKerry 0-16Waterford 0-8
Semi-finalKerry 0-17 Tipperary 1-5
FinalKerry 0-10 Cork 0-10
Final (replay)Cork 1-12 Kerry 0-9
Qualifier Round FourKerry 4-11 Longford 1-11
All-Ireland Quarter-finalKerry 3-15 Armagh 1-13
Semi-finalKerry 0-16Cork 0-10
FinalKerry 4-15Mayo 3-5
2009
Munster Semi-finalCork 1-10Kerry 0-13
Semi-final (replay)Cork 1-17 Kerry 0-12
QualifierRound Two Kerry 1-12 Longford 0-11
Round ThreeKerry 0-14 Sligo 1-10
Round FourKerry 2-12 Antrim 1-10
All-Ireland Quarter-finalKerry 1-24Dublin 1-7
Semi-finalKerry 2-8Meath 1-7
FinalKerry 0-16Cork 1-9
Total games: 29
Won: 23Drawn: 3Lost: 3
Total scored: 36-404 (512)Average scored: 17.7
Total conceded: 22-295 (361)Average conceded: 12.4
