GAELIC GAMES: THE CHANCES of Darragh Ó Sé playing on for another season with Kerry would appear to be slim, at least if comments of his brother Tomás are anything to by.
In Dublin yesterday to collect the Gaelic Players Association (GPA) footballer of the month award for September, his latest honour on the back on Kerry’s All-Ireland-winning finale against Cork, Ó Sé suggested that Darragh may well be tempted to go out on a high.
“I haven’t spoken to him on it,” he said. “He probably will walk away. People say ‘jeez, are ye brothers at all?’, but he’ll have to make that decision himself. If he went out now he’d be going out on a good high, which he deserves. He probably will walk.”
Now aged 34, and having made his championship debut way back in 1994, Ó Sé is still considering his future, and particularly whether or not the body will hold up physically for another year.
At 31, Tomás certainly has a few years left in him, but in collecting his award yesterday, he admitted the 2009 season was one of the most testing of his career – both on and off the field.
“Looking back after winning it is always nice. Throughout the year it was tough. We knew we weren’t too far off it, but we were struggling against teams perceived as weak. Because it was such a long road, and this isn’t a fingers up to anybody who was knocking us, it was sweet to come out of our toughest and longest year yet.”
Ó Sé was infamously dropped for the Antrim qualifier match, along with Colm ‘Gooch’ Cooper, for a breach of discipline, and that, he agreed, was something he could have done without: “We were wrong in what we did and the two of us would be the first to acknowledge that. There’s no sour grapes about the way we were dropped. I didn’t agree with the way it came out. For what we did, we were hung and quartered.
“I had no problem accepting the discipline that was handed out. We did wrong and we had no problems. It was dealt with quickly and I just wish it had stayed indoors.”
On the subject of losing Tommy Walsh and mostly likely David Moran as well to the Australian game, Ó Sé was more understanding: “You can’t blame him. If he gets an offer to play professional sport you have to wish him all the best. Hopefully he won’t enjoy it too much and he’ll come back.
“If you see the weather here today, if you got the chance to go to Australia, you’d just jump at it. I wish him the best of luck in it and hopefully it works out for him. But if it doesn’t work out he’s at the age where he can come back home. The climate we’re in now, jobs aren’t easy to come by.”
Looking ahead to 2010, where Kerry will once again begin their All-Ireland defence on the same side of the Munster championship as Cork, Ó Sé agreed it may be time to freshen things up, perhaps even rejig the entire championship; “I’ve said it for the last couple of years, I think it would be ideal if teams train hard for maybe two months before the championship and then have a game every two weeks.
“We’ve come out of Munster and we’ve won Munster Championships and we’ve gone on to win an All-Ireland and then we’ve done it the other way as well. Any time we seem to do it they seem to jump at us and say it’s helping us in some way. I don’t buy into that at all.
“But I think next year’s game against Cork will be a huge game again, it always is and we look forward to those games. I think they’ve come on very much in the last three or four years and I think they’ll win an All-Ireland in the next few years.”
Claiming the GPA hurler of the month award for September was Kilkenny’s Tommy Walsh who responded to recent criticism of his own game, plus criticism of his team in Donal Óg Cusack’s new autobiography, with typical indifference: “It never bothered me once at all, and I don’t say that lightly. Every hurler gets criticism and I’m hurling now 26 years and I have got criticism before this year. You just learn from it and try and get on with it but it definitely didn’t affect me.”
And as for Cusack comparing Kilkenny to Stepford Wives? “To be honest I don’t really know what the Stepford Wives is,” said Walsh. “We go out and our number one aim is to win the All-Ireland at the end of the year and I think that we have always tried to do our best to help hurling along.
“If two teams play each other quite a lot they will always have a big rivalry. And we have played Cork a lot since 2002 really. You will always have rivalry when one team is beating the other and then the other beats them.”
