Schools out as Kerry’s Gavin White turns focus on tough Tyrone test this weekend

Schools out for summer, and for Gavin White that at least is helping focus the body and mind on his examinations at hand. The results won’t be long coming in.

Kerry, no doubt suitably focused once Tyrone were drawn as their quarter-final opponents, put their All-Ireland football title on the line for the first time on Saturday. Lose, and there’s no longer any way back.

For White, the end of term at St Brendan’s College in Killarney, where he teaches maths and PE, means football is now his primary focus. How long that will continue into July remains to be seen, only it certainly has its advantages for now.

“It certainly helps from a recovery point of view,” he says. “Now, there are pros and cons to it, when you are in school you are in a routine – you are not staying in bed until 10 or 11 o’clock. There is definitely that side if it.

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“From a recovery point of view, last year before the final obviously I had two weeks and I absolutely zoned in on getting the knee right first and foremost, get my body right for the game, which I wouldn’t have been able to do if I was in school.”

Having the summer off to focus on football wasn’t the only reason White chose the teaching profession, but it was an important one: “Probably, yeah. I wouldn’t tell my principal that now! It was definitely a big factor. No, I enjoyed doing the Cúl Camps growing up and obviously PE with the sporting background I have was kind of natural enough.

“Maths, funnily enough, wasn’t my first line of options. I didn’t get my points the first year, so I repeated. That repeat year I really zoned in on the maths.”

At age 26, White is in his eighth season with Kerry, called up in 2016 having played the previous two seasons with the minors. He’s perfectly well versed in the sort of test Tyrone will present on Saturday, and believes Kerry are finding form again after losing their opening round-robin game to Mayo – a first championship defeat in Killarney since 1995.

“Obviously you don’t want your name recognised with that unfortunately but that’s just the way it goes, we haven’t really focused on that much really. There was huge disappointment in the dressingroom after the game but we knew there was plenty left to go in the season, it wasn’t as if we were out of the championship or anything like that.

“We obviously knew we made an uphill battle of it and were probably going to have to play three games in three weeks. But you can’t change it now, no point thinking back on it and sulking over it.

“We didn’t feel we were undercooked going in, nobody feels like that. Maybe looking back on it, obviously the result speaks volumes for itself, we probably were a small bit undercooked and a small bit off on the day. Does that come down to not playing Division One opposition? Possibly. Another factor was Mayo had five or six weeks before that to prep.”

Kerry have still only conceded one goal in the championship so far, to Mayo, but they could have conceded at least three or four more in that same game. They have been missing some seasoned defenders at times, White himself sitting out the league, while at the same time more teams appear to finding ways around the Kerry defence too.

“It’s probably a mixture of both,” White says. “Obviously when I wasn’t there in the league there were other players getting their opportunity and maybe they weren’t as used to the system or not used to the players around them, whatever it might be.

“On the other had as well, definitely other teams are figuring out the way we utilised that last year. The way the game has gone, it is a professional game, you are studied to the absolute nines.

“Any small bit of a tweak you are going to do, teams will cop it straight away and they did cop it and they punished us right throughout the league and in the championship as well, against Mayo we coughed up an awful lot of goal chances. We conceded one, I think, very lucky not to concede two or three. So that was an area we identified after that Mayo game to rectify and try nail down. I wouldn’t say we are there yet, but we are certainly improving on it.”