ALL-IRELAND SFC QUARTER-FINAL KERRY v DUBLIN: As visually recognisable as Killarney's lakes, it hasn't been easy for Colm Cooper recently. But Dublin should be wary. TOM HUMPHRIESreports

BEING COLM COOPER . . . The Gooch, they say, should have got out of Dodge. Somewhere along the line he should have caught the stagecoach and put a little permanent distance between himself and the place which spawned him and which defines him and now threatens to devour him.

That’s merely the wisdom of the crowd, though. Colm Cooper is what he is. A Kerry footballer and a public utility in Killarney. Perhaps he couldn’t be the footballer that he is without being the person that he is. Detachment and distance wouldn’t suit him so well, perhaps.

The wisdom of the crowd? The crowd is always with him. Since he fastened himself surgically, almost, to a football as a little kid on the Ardshanavooly Estate he has carried their great expectations. And lived up to them.

More perhaps than any other contemporary Kerry player, with the exception of Darragh Ó Sé, he seems to embody Kerry football’s vision of itself. The red hair, the slender frame, the genius for invention and improvisation. He seems like the antidote to Northern method and muscularity, the sort of player only Kerry could produce and nurture.

Cooper is as emblematic of and rooted in his home place as it is possible to be, as visually recognisable as the lakes or the jarveys, as vital to his town’s morale as the tourist numbers.

More talked about in Killarney than anybody else. And every dip in his form comes upon us like the drop on a massive rollercoaster. Heeeeee’s finished!

We can be sure it isn’t easy being Colm Cooper. There must be times when he gets in behind the wires and on to the squat green acreage of Fitzgerald Stadium and he feels at last cut off from the madding throng and the eternal discussion which foments over his head like a pending storm. Is he finished? Is he not? How good was he? Will he be as good again? How is he going?

And there must be times when he couldn’t care less if he ever saw the inside of Fitzgerald Stadium again, for Kerry’s tiltings are endless and nothing in the Kingdom is ever enough. The side which Cooper graces vies not just with Tyrone for room on the pedestal but with the Kerry sides of the past. You can’t beat ghosts.

He has been on the chain gang for a long time now. Six All-Ireland finals and five All Star awards. He turned 26 at the start of June. He helped Dr Crokes to a club title back when he was just 16. That’s a lot of excellence laid down.

What does the future offer him? More All-Ireland finals and more All Star awards at best. Those things in return for the pressure-cooker life on the chain gang, for being watched, analysed and parsed every second of your day? Any wonder that sometimes they look at Colm Cooper and, bemoaning his lost coltishness, consign him to the glue factory. He’s finished because he has no reason not to be.

When Cooper went for a few drinks on the night of Kerry’s embarrassingly slim win over Sligo a couple of weeks ago he was in breach of team discipline. More damning evidence, your honour. He left his colleagues and mentors no choice in dealing with the misdemeanour. He knows Killarney and the writ of his own celebrity well enough by now to have known that he wasn’t going to be supping in secret.

One imagines that manager Jack O’Connor would have preferred his star forward to have located a discreet shebeen somewhere in the Arctic Circle, thus sparing himself the need for obvious corrective action. As for the infraction itself though, deep down, Jack O’Connor won’t have been too worried and maybe he will have been slightly relieved.

Jack will remember a few years ago finding the Gooch equally frayed and frazzled and picking him up himself and taking him for a few holes of golf, some food and some pints out near Kenmare.

EVEN FOR A FEW hours, getting the Gooch out of Dodge seemed like a good idea, a necessary valve. If the Gooch cut himself some slack after the Sligo game perhaps it might be the beginning of reeling in some form.

On the chain gang there has to be rules but the older lags need to catch a break every now and then. Cooper (like his colleague in the stockade, Tomás Ó Sé) has given so much to Kerry football at such an accelerated rate that there must have been a distinct half-heartedness about the delivery of sentence from management before the Antrim game.

There would have been a certain foreboding that in the goldfish bowl of Kerry football life the mere news of the punishment would vastly exceed the actual significance of what had happened. This is a squad which for all its longevity appears, if you believe what you read, to have been involved in a permanent sort of Balkan blood feud with itself the whole time.

Jack O’Connor and co were stuck between a rock and a hard place two weeks ago. They issued the showcase chastisement and hoped that memories would be short. They got past Antrim and drew Dublin and the most blinding spotlight money can buy.

No peace! Yet as they travel to the capital tomorrow and read their death notices in the Sunday papers they will allow themselves a few thin smiles. The series of qualifiers which Kerry have limped through over the past few weeks have taught them nothing new nor given them any new freshness. But they were never going to were they? At this time in their footballing lives there are less than a handful of counties which truly interest Kerry when it comes to summertime football. Just like last summer, there was little in the qualifier fare offered by Louth, Westmeath and Mayo which interested a Tyrone side who just as clearly were finished until they played Dublin.

O’Connor is long enough in the tooth to know he presides over a wilfully intelligent dressingroom. Telling his team that Longford, Sligo or Antrim represented great and defining moments in Kerry football history was going to draw nothing but cackles. You don’t go to the well on those days. The qualifiers were the community service which Kerry had to do having lost to Cork. Something to be got through.

They could have been more beneficial had a series of injuries and mishaps to younger players not deprived O’Connor of the chance to keep players in the discomfort zone. Knocks and setbacks with talents like Anthony Maher, Pádraig Reidy, Daniel Bohan and David Moran (we haven’t even come to Kieran Donaghy yet) took a little of the edge out of the training ground games.

And then of course there is the Gooch.

There is no doubt that since he missed his penalty in the first round of the Munster championship against Cork, Cooper has been struggling. No doubt that he had a good league and that nobody saw this slough coming. No doubt either that he is being judged harshly and he travels to Croke Park on Monday to face a Dublin full-back line which lacks the qualifications to feel complacent about him.

It may be exactly the sort of excursion which Cooper needs.

Cooper has reinvented himself several times in the course of his senior career already. Having come in seven years ago as a quicksilver corner forward, he was catching and kicking like an orthodox full forward by the time the All-Ireland final against Mayo came around two years later. Then with the discovery of Kieran Donaghy he learned to be a foil, getting more out of Donaghy and himself, orchestrating the movement between the two men till they played off each other with an ease that seemed natural.

THIS SUMMER, of course, Donaghy has mostly been absent. Tommy Walsh, his closest physical replacement, is a different type of player, more direct and more inclined to hold the ball for those critical few seconds which Cooper has always used to feed off Donaghy.

Kerry have deployed Darran O’Sullivan and Donncha Walsh as the sort of players who run straight at opposition defences. Cooper’s drifting off into spaces tends to reward the runner with open pasture than to reward Cooper. And Declan O’Sullivan is showing more signs of uncertainty in his own play than has been the case in recent seasons, holding the ball longer and drawing more tackles.

Apart from what is going on around him there is no doubt that Cooper’s shooting and general play has been lacklustre so far, betraying the mindset of a man not too switched on just yet. Croke Park has always charged him up, though (his scoring record in All-Ireland finals, for instance, is exceptional, 3-25 in six games) and he comes to town on Monday facing one of the biggest games of his career.

Are the obituaries premature? Almost certainly.

He took four months out last year while Kerry slogged through the 2008 National League. Cruised America in a convertible. Saw just about every top sports event in the flesh. Never kicked an O’Neill’s ball once.

He came back with some perspective gained and was almost immediately in the bump and grind of a typical Kerry season. Paul Galvin sent off against Clare. Darragh sent off. Aidan O’Mahony in trouble. Constant, unceasing dissection and analysis of everything that was done and said. And in the end it finished with a defeat to, of all people, Tyrone.

There must have been times when he wondered what had happened to his four months of rest and recreation. Yet it is the comments he made last summer about what changed him which leads one to suspect that he is far from finished.

He spoke before last year’s All-Ireland final of finding a different role with Kerry, of contributing in different ways or the unsustainability of maintaining a career in the modern game where you chip in 1-5 or 1-6 at a time. He spoke of how little he worried about Kerry football when he was away but of how right it felt when he came back. He spoke about all the years on the attritional road that Kerry players take with club championships that run till Christmas week and for the first time he seemed to have worked out a way to be part of that without it consuming him.

IT COMES WITH the territory that he works and plays in that every drink Colm Cooper takes is documented as a matter of public record and the precise volume consumed exaggerated until he becomes the Paul Bunyan of drinking. If the 19- or 20-year-old Gooch had gone drinking after his side limped home against Sligo the deed would have felt qualitatively different to Colm Cooper having a few pints a fortnight ago.

When Croke Park beckons for him his nostrils flare and his eyes light up and if Dublin want for worry they only have to recall the mischievous beauty there was in the manner he set up Declan O’Sullivan’s goal against Dublin in the semi-final a couple of years ago, imperiously pointing out the play for Killian Young.

He is a changing man in the midst of a creaking team but nothing less than that is going on. Injuries have deprived Kerry of a few options they would have enjoyed exercising but here they are back at the cathedral they know so well.

Cooper faces a Dublin full-back line which will stand or fall on its performance this Bank Holiday Monday. They could suffocate him and give the most tangible evidence yet that Dublin are ready for an All-Ireland. Or he could tease them and torture him with his cuteness and his local knowledge.

One thing is certain. It is as big a day for Colm Cooper as it is for Dublin.

If Kerry fail and the heart of this team is taken to the breaker’s yard over the winter Cork will surely enjoy at least a couple of years’ ascendancy as top dogs of the south. Will a 28, 29-year-old Colm Cooper be in the vanguard of any revival? Would the hunger still be there? Sometime when we weren’t looking Colm Cooper put away childish things. He is on the flipside of his career now and man enough to determine his own course. Kerry need him back on Monday and they need him leading.

Sometimes when you are on the chain gang the easiest thing is to lift everybody else’s shackles up with your own.