“Johneen, a chroí, don’t take that job at all, they’ll be giving out to you.”
Among the many overtly delicate passages in Keys to the Kingdom – the story of an outsider who led Kerry back to glory – are these last dying words of Jack O’Connor’s mother, Sheila, spoken from her hospital bed in October 2003.
Only well he did take it, that job being of Kerry senior football manager, and coming up on two decades later O’Connor has once again delivered those All-Ireland keys to the Kingdom – and one of the hardest won of the lot too.
“Absolutely, they’re the best ones of all,” O’Connor says, sitting back in the media room under the Hogan Stand in the near aftermath of the battle.
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“This was never going to be an easy game. Maybe the tag of favouritism rested heavily on our fellas’ shoulders, particularly in the first half I thought we were very jiggy and not composed on the ball.
“It had to be ground out, and we spoke about that on Thursday night. There are many ways to win a game. We feel that all the work we have done on the mental side of the game with the lads we can dig out a game, we can dog it out.
“As it turned out that was the way. I think there is a lot of belief in the dressing room, a lot of belief in each other.”
Long before O’Connor’s time this job wasn’t so much an appointment as an anointment, one which came with near sacred expectations. Especially coming after Mick O’Dwyer’s 16 unbroken years, and eight All-Irelands, and later Páidí Ó Sé, who twice returned the All-Ireland to its most accustomed home, before O’Connor then took over.
O’Connor knew this better than anyone – “a cabóg from Dromid about to take charge” – only instead of heeding his mother’s last words he used them as moral incentive.
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Still there were perhaps times during the first half of Sunday’s epic and intense showdown with Galway when O’Connor might have feared being given out to because the first and only purpose of his third coming as manager was to deliver this one, a 38th title to the Kingdom, his fourth as manager.
He also becomes the first manager in modern times to deliver an All-Ireland title in three separate periods of appointment, the first in Kerry to win minor, under-20 and senior All-Irelands, this also being his fourth double after league-championship titles in 2004, 2006 and 2009.
Exactly what he came back for so, the sense too that O’Connor could be heralding in another era of Kerry dominance.
“Look, it isn’t about myself,” he says. “It’s about that group of lads. We’ve been trying to put them together since 2014. I finished up with the seniors in 2012, because we knew that a new group needed to come.
“The great team from ‘04 to’09 had come to an end here, 11 years ago, I suppose Stephen Cluxton put an end to them. We knew that a new group had to be developed and whatever. That began in 2014 (when he managed Kerry to the All-Ireland minor title).
“We didn’t think today would take eight years to go the distance, but with that group, I know we won one in ‘14 but this is the five-in-a-row minors really coming through today. We’re just hoping it is the start of something good.”
The very good of this game started in the second half, Kerry coming out a point behind after trailing Galway for much of the first. Shane Walsh picked up where he left off scoring the first after the restart, before every Kerry player it seemed started to play up to their potential.
It was exactly what O’Connor asked of them in the dressing-room.
“There were some hard words possibly too,” he says. “I was quite animated myself at half-time. I felt that we weren’t playing to our potential out there. There were players who had more to give. We’ve always been pretty composed in the dressing room at half-time. But I think today was one where we needed a bit of a jolt.
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“We had the experience of the Dublin game to fall back on. Dublin came back within two points of us with 25 minutes with the wind behind them and all the momentum.
“So I think that probably stood to us in the last 15 to 20 minutes that we had that to fall back on. We have worked incredibly hard on the mental side of the game this year with Tony Griffin. I just think we needed everything in the end to get over the line because that was a really good Galway display.”
Whatever about being under his own pressure and expectation, O’Connor made no secret of the pressure on David Clifford, and how he once again soared above it.
“I went down there to the corner under Hill 16 at the angle where David Clifford kicked that last free and I will tell you something that is some kick, that is some kick. There was a tricky wind going in there and he did not have much to aim at and he stuck it over so hats off to him.
“Look, he is a remarkable man and that weight of expectation has been on him since he was 18 and he has jumped every hurdle he has come across. He jumped another big one today.”
In his own way O’Connor did too.
Read all the news, analysis and comment on Kerry’s win, here.
