A destination Kerry don’t want Declan to reach
He’ll throw himself into South Kerry’s Championship bid and then wade into the winter trench warfare that doubles as the South Kerry divisional championship with Dromid.
Because that’s Declan O’Sullivan’s way. And, maybe before Christmas, he’ll call Fitzy and wish him the best for 2015. And they’ll chat about the team holiday and the kids. And those knees and how they’re holding up. And Declan will eventually bring up the fact there won’t be 2015 for him.
And his coach will get that sick, leaden feeling in the pit of his stomach because it will confirm for him what most Kerry fans in Croke Park yesterday might have forgotten in their giddiness over a 37th All-Ireland.
That they were watching the last, heroic acts of an astonishing football career. That Declan O’Sullivan, a gladiator rivalling Seamus Moynihan for the reverence in which he is held by football’s cognoscenti in the Kingdom, won’t be around to set the standard in the dressing-room for the new All-Ireland champions. That’ll be a sobering prospect to digest.
When he returned this season in time for Kerry’s Algarve training camp, everyone’s clock ticked faster. Word quickly spread that O’Sullivan was setting the tone in training and not minding who he upset.
He smiled at such a wicked whisper last night, with his son, Ollie, all alone, in the dressing room. He returned from drug testing to find the party had moved upstairs. A moment to pause, to ponder an incredible past and a certain future. His wife sat in the Hogan Stand yesterday, due their second child at any moment. Kerry’s team logistics manager Niall O’Callaghan had preparations made in Dublin and Kerry hospitals if the need arose.
“I came back saying this could possibly be my last year and I’m not going to walk away with regrets wondering ‘why didn’t I do that or why didn’t I say that?’ when it needed to be said,” he explained. “And that gave me a strange sort of freedom, the freedom to say ‘I’m not here to make friends’. In this dressing room, a friend is a fella who tears back past you when you’re struggling for legs and makes a tackle for you and the team. He’s the man who bails you out.
“If you’re going to win All-Irelands they are the minute details no-one outside the group notices. Eamonn [Fitzmaurice] calls them the one per centers. A man gets a paw in, puts the guy who’s taking the kick off enough to avoid conceding a score or a killer pass. This year, I didn’t care if I upset people in certain ways, that’s what we needed to become.”
He has been in this place eight times, leaving Jones Road five times as champion. But it has left him physically broken up, the role he fulfils leaving him in the way of some brutal collisions.
“Croke Park is his arena, he was born to play here,” said Jack O’Connor this week. “And he has given every ounce of himself for the cause. He always does,” said his long-time mentor. “He is shy enough off the pitch, but all great players are like that, aren’t they?
“Declan made his debut for Dromid at 15, and got a goal that day. But he has played a world of hard football over the period. In 2004, on his 21st birthday, Dromid won a South Kerry championship final — for Dromid to win that was incredible. The hits he took that day were frightening. That football wasn’t for the faint-hearted. The only man I can compare to him in terms of leaving it all out there for the cause is Seamus Moynihan. It didn’t matter who they were playing, they just emptied the tank every single day.”
Not every day did he have rewards. Booed off by his own in Cork in 2009, turned over for the vital possession in Dublin’s late, late show of 2011, he often wintered with the weight of the world on his shoulders. Football didn’t mean everything, it was the only thing for this warrior.
How much more he can give is a moot point. A tough job that involves plenty of air miles and travelling, a growing family and banjaxed knees. He may not yet be 31, but his body is packing up. “What that man has gone through this year for the squad is frightening,” Fitzmaurice said yesterday. “He has put himself through hell to help us. He’ll have to go away now and get his knees sorted. The lads have started calling him Paul McGrath at training.”
“Ah it’s been difficult,” admitted O’Sullivan last night. “Difficult and frustrating. I had taken the league off to get myself right, and then I came back from Portugal with a slight twinge in one of my knees, and then against Clare in the Championship, I hurt the other one. It just compounded the problem but I knew this. I met Eamonn in October and said maybe it’s not in the legs anymore, but I would fulfil whatever role he needed me to. So, mentally, I was in a different place this season. I wanted to help if, nothing else, bringing a huge positivity to the squad.”
What will surely sustain him for a long time is the sense of purpose and direction around Kerry football again. Yesterday’s minor success was a huge fillip, but the senior win might have been the most significant All-Ireland since O’Dwyer’s babes on 1975. Vindication then?
“Where this team started from was a very difficult and dark period,” O’Sullivan ponders. “RTÉ, in their wisdom, had 6.1 News down to trawl the county looking for fellas to talk about Kerry football being in crisis.
“That was a very difficult environment for the young fellas coming in, but perversely that drove them on and it drove us senior lads too. But that sense of inner conviction and leadership comes from the management. Eamonn has been superb. Without a manager who creates that environment, players can’t grow. He created an environment where fellas could be comfortable in a dressing room where they knew those in charge trusted them. It’s been grow, grow, grow for the last two years.
“A bonus All-Ireland? I don’t know. From the outside, people wouldn’t have expected it, but the dressing room, the bond of a dressing room, is an entirely different place. You should have seen this place [dressing room] after the All-Ireland semi-final last year against Dublin. One of the games of the century? It didn’t seem like that from where I was sitting. You might think you are doing everything right, but it’s still not enough, still had to bring it on the day.
“This season, fellas came with a harder edge to them, they trained unbelievably. That’s the biggest thing for me, the most significant thing I’ve noticed since I started playing with Kerry — the way this group of young fellas trained, how they left everything out there every single night. If you are looking for things that made the difference, well that’s what they brought — unbelievable dedication to their training — physically, weights, every facet. And that will always give you a great chance — if you’re at it physically, you’re almost there.”
Declan O’Sullivan is almost there. Except it’s a place few in Kerry — and footballing people everywhere — want him to reach.
