In all seriousness, lads, who do ye think ye are?

In Kerry they can get very serious in telling you how they take their football very serious.

Animals and anonymous letters aren’t the half of it. There’ve been anonymous phone calls too, with the one Mikey Sheehy received upon entering a bar, castigating him for missing a penalty in an All-Ireland final two decades earlier, a line routinely trotted out as evidence of just how on the money Páidí was with his assessment of how restless and ruthless the natives can get.

A particular favourite of ours is a scene Paul Galvin paints in his book. A couple of weeks after the 2011 All-Ireland final defeat to Dublin, he was in a queue in a hardwood store when an old man in his late 70s approached him.