O’Connor reveals focused Kingdom's war cry
June saw the turmoil of an exit from the Munster championship, July was a rancorous affair with his side operating under a fog of rumours. Yet by August everything has fallen neatly into place.
When the show moved to the big house in Croke Park, Kerry were still standing. Dublin were swatted aside with ease in the quarter-final, Meath seen off yesterday in a war of attrition on a sodden day. Kerry are down to the last two for the sixth successive year. Easy to understand, then, why O’Connor looked so satisfied at 5pm yesterday evening.
“It’s a huge landmark for a county with the tradition that we have to be there for the sixth year. This team has been written off so many times. Our last war cry before leaving the dressing room today was that they’d been written off as far back as 2001. But they keep coming back.”
Some players were singled out for special praise. Like Mike McCarthy, who shuffled from retirement into centre-back in midsummer and has made a momentous contribution ever since then.
“Mike’s still going strong, he’s still defying the odds. I thought he’d a powerful second half. He gave us great momentum and shored up the backline. I just hope he has another big performance in him.”
And Tommy Walsh, the Kerins O’Rahilly’s beanpole who absorbed his omission from the starting 15 and fired 1-2 when introduced.
“That’s the way you want a fella to react when you leave him off. There’s good spirit in our camp despite all the rumours of disunity. Fellas realise if they have a bad day, they might be let off the next day. But he put down a marker for the next day.”
Of all their semi-final successes, this latest Kerry win will rank low in terms of quality with the pitch a major factor. Yet O’Connor was nonplussed and remarked it was the type of win that will stand to Kerry.
“We played the league final here back in April and there was no intensity in it. But today’s game, every ball was hard fought for. That’s the way you want a semi-final to pan out. You don’t want a loose, open game where there’s no physicality.
“When you get rain on top of that pitch, you’re looking at an ice rink. A drop of rain on a hard sod means there’s no give in it. Look we’re not going to go over this old chestnut again. That’s the great imponderable, how do you get a surface, that gets so much traffic, to be playable?”
O’Connor dismissed any pre-match notions of a repeat of the Dublin destruction as churlish.
“I don’t think the team, panel or management were complacent before this. The Dublin game is not the real world. We said that all the week. Meath always keep plugging away. Their backs stuck in tight to our forwards and we found it hard to make headway in the first half.
“Midfield was one area we worked on because Meath destroyed Mayo in the middle of the field. There was one stat where three of their men got 15 breaks between them: Kenny, Peadar Byrne and Joe Sheridan. So that was an area we zoomed in on. We did pretty well there. We’ve a lot of work to do and I don’t think today would frighten the daylights out of Cork.”
Mention of the old enemy on September 20, prompts O’Connor to go into underdog mode. There’s no doubt in his mind as to who will carry the mantle of favouritism into the All-Ireland football showdown.
“Cork beat us by eight points and that’s comprehensive in any language. This old story about Cork not performing in Croke Park, has been put to bed now. We’ll be put to the pin of our collar.
“They’re the best team in this year’s championship. That’s a fact and they’ll probably be favourites going into the final. But we feel we’ll give them a better game than we did in June. We’ve the physical work done and it’ll be a case of us mentally tuning in now for the final.”
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