GAELIC GAMES:IN MANY ways all the stress and strain and ultimate salvation of Kerry's All-Ireland-winning journey is encapsulated in Colm "Gooch" Cooper – the absence of form, the rumours of discontent, the talk of injury, and then deliverance, writes IAN O'RIORDAN.

If any player deserved to bask in their victory it would the Gooch, except like most of his team-mates, he now has to deal with the Kerry club championship – which of course is a very big deal.

Not that he’s complaining. Cooper is out this Sunday with Dr Croke’s in the last 16 tie of the county championship against Killarney rivals Legion, and that, he says, simply means getting back to doing what he loves most; playing football.

“It would be a lot more difficult if we’d lost the All-Ireland,” he says, “and I have seen both sides of the fences with that. But even at that, when you lose you get back on the bike and you cycle again. It’ll be nice to get back with the club, get back with your buddies and the lads you are close with.

“That’s what the GAA’s about, fundamentally, about the club. People will argue that lads are tired, but when you’re winning you don’t feel fatigued or tired or drained.”

There were times during the summer, however, when Cooper looked really drained – as did most of his team-mates.

In Dublin yesterday, at the announcement of AIB’s continued sponsorship of the club championship, he suggests Kerry’s form was understandably questionable from the outside looking in, but inside it was never quite as bad.

“I suppose this year was particularly satisfying. The league went quite well, I felt. In the Munster championship we didn’t play well. We managed to get a draw the first day against Cork, but we were hammered in the replay. Then we showed little form in the qualifiers, if no form. But regardless of what people were saying, I always felt that although we weren’t near it, I felt we weren’t too far away from finding the form.

“It was being built up that things were so drastic, but I felt the players were there to do it and I was never overly panicked with the situation. We were being written off in a lot of quarters and maybe deservedly after what we’d shown. We just felt if we could get back to Croke Park . . . Whatever it is about the place.

“We just seem to play well there, enjoy it, and leave everything out there. But that Dublin game was probably a freak of nature. It was a combination of this team putting in one of its best ever performances, against Dublin, who mightn’t have been tested as much, and just never played, and I don’t know, maybe threw in the towel a small bit.

“That game gave us the confidence to say ‘look, there’s an All-Ireland here to be won’. Just keep improving. But we’d trained really hard, really well, since being beaten by Cork and I felt that step -up in the intensity in training certainly played a huge role in how we played for the rest of the year.”

Still there were other things to deal with. Cooper, along with Tomás Ó Sé, was dropped before the Antrim qualifier game for disciplinary reasons and then before the semi-final against Meath he was the subject of an apparent injury scare – which threatened to end his season.

“Well I wasn’t functioning too well before the Meath game. I did not train that week, tore a tendon on my right hip the previous Friday. But prior to the final I was fine and I trained all the time. But the focus stayed on it.

“I remember we stayed in the Europe Hotel in Killarney one night and we threw on the Teletext and I was definitely out of the final. I shared with Darren O’Sullivan that night and he said ‘you are not going to believe what’s on here.’ I would say what probably happened is that we closed for a couple of sessions and people might have felt that this was being done for a reason and obviously they were saying that I was doubtful because of my hip, but I trained in every session before the final.

“And it was 100 per cent. I just worked away and did a little bit of harder work with it and tried to build it back up and thankfully it did not play any role in the final.”

The ultimate salvation then came against Cork and, over a week on, Cooper talks a little more openly about how that was a game he felt Kerry were primed to win.

“In many ways it was set up for us. We felt Cork were going really, really well all the year really. They had won their own league, blown us away in the championship and blown Tyrone and Donegal away.

“We just felt if we could stick with them for a while, hang in there, be it a tough game, we felt that there was an All-Ireland to be won. That they were being built up and built up. And I suppose they had rarely gone into a game against Kerry where they were favourites. So maybe it suited us to come in under the radar, if you want to say that.

“And I don’t think I was involved in an All-Ireland where, I won’t say the hype wasn’t as big, but there didn’t seem to be as much focus on us. And they hadn’t beaten us in Croke Park. It wasn’t something we talked about really, but I’d say it played more on their minds that it did ours.

“Because in many regards they were the ones coming to Croke Park with all the pressure on them, to beat Kerry on the big day, when it really mattered. Not in a Munster semi-final and final. That’s not to bring down the Munster championship, but I suppose Cork still had an agenda to beat Kerry or someone in the final . . .

“Maybe that had nothing to do with them losing, but certainly I felt there was a little more pressure on Cork than on us.

“When I saw Colm O’Neill rapping in the goal I felt ‘Oh no, here we go again’. But I just think that we chipped away. I suppose that’s down to the fact that we were in a couple of finals and had lost close games to Tyrone and that experience probably stood to us.

“If you go right through our team, the number of All-Irelands some of our fellows have played in. Darragh Ó Sé played in 10, Tomás in nine, others fellows have played in seven, so there was a lot of experience there right through the team and in a couple of minutes we had got it back to level.”