O’Mahony: Most special of them all

Anyone happening upon the Poitín Still in Rathcoole last Monday night might have gone cool on the prospects of Kerry lifting a 37th All-Ireland football title less than a week later.

Hunched around a table, after further medical intervention in the Santry Sports Clinic were Aidan O’Mahony (ankle), Peter Crowley (ankle) and Declan O’Sullivan (knees). Each, though, with a grim determination to keep pain at bay for one more week. One more resolute than the next.

“Once you get to the (final) weekend, you’ll be fine because the adrenaline kicks in anyway,” veteran defender O’Mahony said yesterday, a fifth Celtic Cross soothing sores.

“I love the hard training, even at 34, but the last couple of weeks, I’ve been in and out of Santry, getting injections on the ankle. It was getting to the stage where it was so sore on the bones, I couldn’t even touch them. But you don’t sleep the night before the final anyway, the adrenaline is coursing through you, and nothing will stop you at that stage. Once you get over that white line, nothing else matters. Only winning.”

O’Mahony has a share of those memorable experiences since his winning debut season a decade ago, but nothing compares to 2014. Tired and still sore in the aftermath of Sunday’s cliff-hanger against Donegal, he offered a rousing appraisal of what turned Kerry from write-offs to right stuff this summer.

“This is the most special one of them all for me. There was a massive well of self-belief there, without doubt this is the closest panel I’ve been involved in. Since our last league game against Cork in Tralee, people were writing us off, but with the gates closed in Fitzgerald Stadium, no-one knew what was going on. The only belief was the belief in the group. I’d have fantastic praise for the younger lads in the group, they’ve been pushing the older lads.”

But without Declan O’Sullivan, Marc Ó Sé, Kieran Donaghy and O’Mahony pushing their buttons?

“Myself and Marc were inside there in the full-back line at one stage on Sunday, and we caught each other’s eye with a look that said ‘we are not going to be beaten here today’.

“We sat in the dressing room beforehand, and made promises to each other. There’s a bit of hurt there for us with Donegal. We came up short again them in 2012, and I made a promise to myself and everyone else on Sunday that I wasn’t going to be beaten by Michael Murphy. I just couldn’t be. I couldn’t live with myself if he’d beaten me. That’s what I had to do.

“Before we left the hotel Sunday morning, I was talking to (Rathmore colleague) Paul Murphy, who reminded me of where I was in 2004 for my first final. ‘Mark your man, you’ll still get on ball. That’s your primary job’, and he did an incredible job on Ryan McHugh.

“It was the same with myself and Michael Murphy. If he went into the Hogan Stand, I was following him. It’s what you do for the team, that’s what Eamonn asked me to do. You get massive belief from Fitzy, that’s the kind of man he is. We spoke during the week and he simply said ‘You’re on Murphy, mark him out of the game’.

“I’d do anything for Eamonn. I played with him, I’ve seen his character. He has massive belief in the dressing room. For the first round of the Championship against Clare, I was dropped and I was hugely disappointed because I thought I was going well. I had it out with him, but it drove me on too. I think I had more legs in me this year than I did ten years ago.”

Which makes talk of retirement for O’Mahony premature. For 70 minutes on Sunday, he hassled and harried the Glenswilly colossus down cul de sacs and into headspaces he didn’t want to be. O’Mahony lingered deliberately on the field afterwards, because the last five years has taught him not to take these moments for granted.

“There’s such a bond between those players, I just love every single one of them. Everyone from No’s 1 to 34, it’s fantastic group of guys who keep everything in-house. As an older player, all you do is what you’re asked. You try to share the experience you have of winning an All-Ireland. Even sitting around together before the game, I was asking guys to just savour the moment, use it to energise them. When I started off in 2004, we were in an All-Ireland nearly every season, and maybe we took it a bit for granted. Now though, I’ve never seen any team to be written off as much as we were this year. Had we got that bad? Look at James O’Donoghue, watch the amount of ball he got on when the game was on a knife edge. He was the provider, not the finisher, this time. It was about the team, not the individual.”