Spring slumber, summer success?
Saturday games mean lots of tweaks to a player’s regimen, pretty much all of them good. Having a Sunday off tops everyone’s list but teatime starts also mean no need for mounds of pasta and chicken when everyone else is scrambling eggs or slicing banana onto their muesli.
“If it is a two o’clock game (on a Sunday) you get up and have breakfast and you’re then trying to eat a big meal at something like half-eleven or twelve o’clock so it’s just ridiculous,” explains O’Sullivan. “It’s very hard to do.”
Truth is though, he probably wouldn’t care if tonight’s game was played past midnight on tarmac. After six long and successful years of almost constant football, the Dromid Pearses man got married in the New Year and waved adieu to the game until early April when he returned against Monaghan .
He feels fresh after it. Ready to go. But then, much the same could be said for the rest of the Kerry lads. Not everyone skipped the spring but every man jack of them had already been handed an extra two months off last summer thanks to the defeat to Down. After six Septembers and six All-Ireland finals, it was a jolt to the system but the shock of it has got their electrodes pumping this year.
“Fellas were able to go back to their friends and a normal lifestyle and all that is good. Fellas seem to be refreshed and management were allowed go away and look at the whole panel and preparation and new players have been added to the panel and so on. When you are beaten in a quarter-final it forces you to shake things up as well.”
No defeat can be stripped down to one determining factor but Kerry put themselves behind the eight ball that day when they took to the field without the suspended Tomas Ó Sé and Paul Galvin.
The side’s discipline, or lack of it, has been dissected to the nth degree too many times to pour over the findings again. Suffice it to say here that O’Connor was lamenting his side’s tendency to attract red cards as long ago as his first term in charge and yet they now find themselves approaching another championship tie without a key player.
Today, it will be Tomás Ó Sé on the sidelines and yet it wouldn’t be right to point all this out without making mention of the fact that it was Kerry who finished top of the GAA’s own Fair Play Index after the Allianz League campaign during which they picked up just 14 yellows in seven rounds.
“You can’t condone it. It’s happened us too often at this stage. We’re trying to brush up on it. We don’t think we’re a dirty team. We try to play football the way it’s supposed to be played but there’s no denying we’ve been involved in a few high-profile incidents. Hopefully that will be the end of it.”
Discipline can at least be determined by force of will. The same can’t be said of age. Kerry are making their way through this summer’s championship much like Tyrone – a side loaded with class and experience but one carrying the scars of battle from distant campaigns and with a supposed lack of fresh faces to reel in the spiralling ageing demographic.
Unlike Tyrone, the fear stalks that the supply line from the underage grades isn’t what it needs to be to restock the armoury at senior. Defeats such as the Munster U21 mauling by Cork and the Munster minor semi-final, when Tipp turned around an 11 point deficit, aren’t reassuring anyone.
O’Sullivan knows what it is to take crippling hits at underage. Eight years ago, himself, Colm Cooper and Kieran Donaghy were on an U21 team managed by O’Connor that lost a final to Waterford and, as he points out, Kerry didn’t do too badly from that particular crop and have managed to shepherd players through in twos and threes ever since.
That said, he accepts changes need to be made. “There will have to be an overhaul of underage structures in the county. Those results got noticed and people have to put plans in action not to let it happen. It has been a long time since we won a minor.”
All that is for another day.
Limerick and a rare lie-in await.
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