It was one of life’s ironies. Colm Cooper, having made an ad in conjunction with his employers AIB all about how much he’d like to win the bank-sponsored All-Ireland club title to put with all the other silverware from one of the great football careers, ended his most recent campaign three seasons ago with a ruptured cruciate and another semi-final defeat.
The ad kept screening, its tagline about the All-Ireland club being the toughest title to win bleakly reflected in its subject’s season-ending injury.
Next Sunday, he and Dr Crokes are back in a provincial final, against Waterford champions The Nire, hoping to kick-start an All-Ireland challenge that can finally fulfil his most conspicuous remaining ambition.
“There’s a few left! Look, I’ve been very open and honest about this for years. It’s a medal that I’d love to win. I’ve two brothers who have won it [in 1992 when he was an eight-year old mascot]; people in the club have won it.
“It’s a competition I hold very close to my heart and it’s the ultimate for any club player so of course I want to win it but there’s five other guys here today who are thinking the same thing.”
A run earlier this decade saw the club lose three successive All-Ireland semi-finals to go with the final defeat from 10 seasons ago. Asked does he think that the Killarney club will be bringing anything different to the table this year, Cooper is cautious.
“You always think you do but until you have the tests and the Munster final and possibly after Christmas, you don’t really know. A couple of years we thought we were coming with something different and maybe we were but it still wasn’t good enough.
‘Pretty good age demographic’
“We know that what we have brought to the table so far hasn’t been good enough to get us to where we want to go. Are we better a team? I hope and think we are. We’ve matured a bit as a team.
“I think the age demographic is pretty good. We have older guys coming through; we’ve under-21s who have come into the team. I think our squad is stronger but you have to produce it on the field and that’s going to be our task for this Sunday and hopefully for more Sundays after that.
“You won’t really know until you’re in the heat of a battle.”
The crusade takes on additional urgency as the clock ticks on in his career. Thirty-three this year, he has had a couple of frustrating seasons at inter-county, as Kerry have found Dublin impossible to negotiate and as a result the wait for a fifth All-Ireland medal goes on.
Cooper has been toying with the idea of retirement from inter-county football but says he won’t make a decision until the club season is over. He is bullish though, happy with his physical fitness and still talking with sufficient ambition to make it entirely possible that he will return to Éamonn Fitzmaurice’s panel when his business with Crokes is done.
“I’ve had very little talk with Éamonn or any of the management about it. We met last weekend but didn’t discuss it, just at a function. No, I think because the Crokes thing has been so busy and all my energies have gone into that, I just want to see how the year finishes out and see how I’m feeling about everything. We’ll make the right decision then.”
Hard lessons
He enumerates the hard lessons from earlier in the decade. “Maybe we weren’t as good as we thought we were. Maybe we thought we were working hard but maybe we weren’t working as hard as other people. Maybe we needed to sacrifice more and maybe we didn’t handle the Christmas break well. Again that comes from the experience of it all.”
He also believes that the return of Pat O’Shea, who managed the club to the 2007 All-Ireland final and took Kerry to the All-Ireland in the same year, in a refreshed management will improve their chances.
He would be in favour of a calendar-year season for clubs but isn’t optimistic that the relevant proposal, currently on the back-burner while director general Páraic Duffy’s blueprint for an expanded All-Ireland inter-county season is discussed, will be activated any time soon.
Cooper is asked about his overall remaining ambitions aside from the specific desire to win a club All-Ireland.
“It’s just to continue playing and win, basically. Is that to win more with Kerry? Does that mean I’m not retiring? For as long as I’m playing I just want to keep winning, if that’s with Dr Croke’s or Kerry – whatever.
“I hear the cliché too often: if I win this I wouldn’t care if I never win again. I’m not at all like that. I want to win next Sunday and I want to continue winning in 2017 as well.”
