What's another year?

WHERE DO you go after scaling the highest peak? Last year Dara Ó Cinnéide captained Kerry to an All-Ireland victory, scoring eight points for good measure. He talked to Michael Moynihan about giving another year to the green and gold.

In September 2004 a quiet man from the west Kerry Gaeltacht got one of the rarest views in Irish sport.

Dara Ó Cinnéide shook off the disappointments of 2002 and 2003 to lead the Kingdom to All-Ireland glory last season but surely, with no new worlds to conquer, he thought of going out on a high?

“Well, Johnny Crowley walked away nice and quiet, and that’s always been the way in Kerry. Once you reach a peak there’s only downhill, whether you like it or not, but I spoke to a few people and they said ‘You’ll enjoy your football in 2005 like you never did before.’

“They were right, they were bang on. Normally I never enjoy the national league campaign, but I enjoyed every minute of it, even though I was struggling with a few injuries. Retiring never occurred to me, to be honest.”

Retirement couldn’t be an option if you had unfinished business in any case, but the Radio Na Gaeltachta presenter shows a flaw or two inthe ‘Kerry seek redemption’ argument.

“People are talking about this being a defining moment in the season, I don’t see it that way. When we played Galway in 2002 people said it was a defining moment, the two dominant teams of the modern era - whore members that now?

“This is another All-Ireland to be won. The fact that it’s Tyrone wouldn’t make it any better than beating Galway in 2000 or Mayo in 2004, that’s being honest.”

But that’s not doing us conspiracy theorists any favourites. We want to hear that losing to Tyrone in 2003 was worse than Armagh in 2002; we need to amp up the pre-match tension.

“You could even go back to the defeat by Meath in 2001, that was humiliating. As Jack has said about 2003, Tyrone out-fought us on the day. That didn’t please a lot of people, but we didn’t complain about it. We didn’t particularly enjoy that day. We were beaten - out-fought, out-muscled, out-thought - and when Tyrone went onto win the All-Ireland a month later, we realised ‘Jeez, football has taken a new direction here, we better go with it.’ And we have gone with it.”

Part of Kerry’s new direction was trainer Pat Flanagan, widely credited with revitalising the Kingdom’s fitness regime.

“Pat’s made the training very enjoyable. It’s not easy - it can be enjoyable and difficult at the same time - but he trains us for specific games and times of the year. He’s been brilliant. Last year he was telling us we wouldn’t see the benefits of the weight training until this year, and I think there has been an improvement physically.”

A lot of Kerry’s opponents would agree. Cork put it up to Kerry in the Munster final but were blown away in the All-Ireland semi-final. Ó Cinnéide nods.

“I think people were surprised with our approach against Cork in the semi-final, but the key word was work-rate, I think we forgot about that for a couple of years. We thought for a while the ‘juegobonito’ would win the All-Ireland every year, but it doesn’t happen like that - we had to get back to our blue-collar roots of hassling and harrying.

“I wasn’t surprised by the margin of our win over Cork, I though there was too much emphasis placed on the Munster final, which was a funny game for us, a real no-win situation. We got closer to the real prize in the Mayo game and started coming to the boil nicely for the Cork game. I hope that wasn’t the boiling point, I hope there’s another kick in us, obviously. Whether that’ll be enough against Tyrone... we’re coming up against a team which has mastered that for the last couple of years. It’ll be an interesting contrast of styles, if nothing else.”

Ó Cinnéide concedes that a nail-biter like the Tyrone-Armagh semi-final is obviously better preparation for an All-Ireland final, but Kerry are an experienced side, and that has its own advantages.

He’s a lot more relaxed now than when he started, though there’ll be plenty of butterflies Sunday morning. It also leads to speculation about how many Kerry players will see the dressing-rooms in Croke Park again.

“There’s probably a lot of fellas who think that, but we’ll leave that until the 26th of September. For the time being there’s four or five fellas 30 or over, and you’re obviously saying to yourself that maybe there’s not too much time left, but the body is willing and the mind is good. As long as that’s the case we’ll go right to the wall with it. There’s maybe five players have been there since 1997, while a dozen or so have been around since 2000.

“We still enjoy contesting the ball in training and we get on very well. It’s a personal thing, you want to squeeze every last ounce out of yourself as a footballer, as an athlete, before walking off into the sunset.”

Ó Cinnéide is well aware that Tyrone’s punishing nine-game run-in could be an advantage:

“We found in 2002, when we had a lot of games, that you just want games, you don’t want training. Now they’ve had a few weeks off and I’m sure they have the expertise, like us, to sort out training for those three weeks.

Speaking of the big day in Croke Park, what were his thoughts on his fellow Gaeilgeoir from over the county bounds on the 11th?

“It was great to hear that speech from Sean Óg, everyone has great meas on him. It was probably hard for him to come in and learn the language when he was young compared to myself, but now he’s a great supporter of Irish and he’s helped the status of the language a lot. I was delighted with his speech a couple of weeks ago.”

He’d be happier still to hear some more Munster Irish on the loudspeakers next Sunday.