‘Everything I’ve won on the line again’

JACK O’CONNOR is standing with his selectors, hands burrowed into his wet suit pockets.

Galway have rolled over and died in the National League and Kerry’s captain has had a field day in Killarney. Another one.

And it’s only March 13.

“Any way,” chinstrokes Jack, “we can stick Gooch in cold storage til the autumn?”

Recounting this for Colm Cooper, he knows what’s coming next. Ah yes, a step ahead.

“I don’t plan specifically for Croke Park in August and September if that’s what you’re asking,” he says. “My training doesn’t differ from May, June to September. If I play poor in March it won’t bother me, just as I won’t worry about peaking too soon if I play well.

“But I know, we all know, the time to play is August and September. And I know I cannot play at a peak from March to September. Neither physically or mentally. Not many players can. But I know when I need to be razor sharp.”

And on the Gillette scale, how sharp is Gooch’s razor sharp? “Like, something breaks and you’ve the pass made in your head before you actually make it. I’m a step ahead, I can see things really quickly, and then it comes down to just following that instinct. Not even following it. Trusting it, letting it take over.”

Does adrenaline help or hinder at that moment? “The big occasions are usually in Croke Park, and it’s an easier place to play anyway — the size of the crowd, the surrounds, the pitch scale and quality.

“Look at it another way. That Down disaster last year (even though Cooper was exceptional himself)...crappy Saturday, no atmosphere. And the Limerick quarter-final this year. Look it was fine, (but) when you’re ten points up, without knowing it your body comes down a notch or two.”

In the corner of Gooch’s living room is a new Taylor Made R11 driver, still in the bubble wrap. No time to use it yet. This is a man who studies other sporting achievers, their methods, their sense of timing, mental durability. But he loves golf. Cooper’s alone time is driving two minutes out the road to Killarney Golf Club for six or seven holes. Thinking about getting up for the August and September majors. Like that game-changer goal in the semi-final, suffocating a Mayo challenge that had just come up for air.

Razor sharp.

“I don’t know. I think Darran (O’Sullivan) was going for a point but I said ‘this thing isn’t going to make it at all’. I thought the keeper was going to get there before me, so the first thing was getting to the break of it quickly. First I was thinking a point, but I knew even with my back to the goal the Mayo defenders were waiting for me to hook it over with my left foot. So I’d have been blocked by the both of them. I don’t know, it just seemed to happen naturally, they both seemed to go to my left, and it just opened up then. It’s an instinctive thing.”

Except he’s done it before, seven years ago at the same Davin End against the same hapless opposition. “I enjoyed that goal more,” he says of the 2004 final strike. “There was a little bit of everything — overhead catch, take off, step inside and just roll it in.”

READING the coldness of that description, I know what you are thinking. Kinda confident is our Gooch, isn’t he? Of course he is. How else could a sportsman breathing in the most demanding air in the GAA world burden all that expectation without his legs collapsing beneath him. Captain of Kerry, creator for Kerry. More than 82,000 pairs of eyes will train on Gooch tomorrow, even when the game is nowhere in his vicinity. Just to see where he hides the rabbits.

But he remains impossibly normal. As ordinary as dunking fig rolls in his tea (of course he does) and eating chips with his fish. He has no commercial agent though if he was of a mind, he could be milking his popularity a lot more than he does. If he hadn’t learned to say no, he might be cutting ribbons and kissing babies for a living.

He has deals with Lucozade, adidas and now Opel. But days in Dublin are days out of work and he doesn’t feel right about that. “I’m a pretty uncomplicated fella. You have to remain a bit grounded too.”

I’m not sure how unshakeable that confidence is, but in his first All-Ireland victory at 21, he didn’t touch the ball for the first 14 minutes. That’s the same final he said sashayed past Mayo’s Pat Kelly to weave that wonder goal. Two years later he was a step ahead of Cork’s Graham Canty all day in the Munster final, but couldn’t finish. At all. Didn’t worry him, Cooper says. “Form wasn’t the problem.”

And now they tell him a No 13 has never lifted Sam Maguire in the history of the All-Ireland football championship. Should he get on the train at all today?

“Pressure from whom?” he shrugs at the mention, his voice raising an octave. “If I was worried about the experts, I would have retired four or five years ago. In 2009, remember, I was hopeless in July and a master in September. I went from packing it in to being a legend in a few months. Are you going to take any notice of that?

“Look, I could have a horror show on Sunday, have one of those days. People say ‘ah he plays well in the All-Ireland’. Well the day will come when I won’t. I must be due a bad one.” And they’ll CSI him on the Sunday Game and wonder about the weight of expectation. “I think I’ve seen it once this season,” he says. “I’ll make my own judgement of what’s right and wrong.”

He was wrong to break a Kerry management drink curfew during the 2009 Qualifier run, just as this newspaper was wrong in many people’s eyes to publish it on the front page. He doesn’t necessarily agree it accelerated the maturing process but he concedes it was a “sharp learning curve.” Of greater import, Cooper believes, was his decision to move out from under his mother’s feet later that year. At 28, time to take off the stabilisers.

“That was a big thing,” he agrees, and only those who appreciate how close Gooch, the youngest, is to his mother Maureen, will understand. With Geraldine, Karen, Danny, Mark, Mike and Vince gone from Ardshanavooly, making that final break was tougher, a lot tougher, than he thought.

“I needed to better understand responsibility. My mother was babysitting me, looking after me in every way. It was very difficult in some ways, very difficult. I kept saying to myself ‘how do you say this, go about it’. It was the hardest thing I had to do. Like, I’m only a mile back the road but she wasn’t too happy at first, upset. All her life she had a packed house. But I’m still over there all the time.”

With the benefit of life experiences and a sharp rear view mirror, he can also trace his football development from willowy wonder to first man out at Croke Park. Kerry captain.

“Before, you go with the flow and enjoy everything. There’s more responsibility now. People are looking to me now in the same way I looked up to others previously. It’s growing up. You’ve seen a lot, have a feel for things. Do your team-mates need a kick up the arse or are you better to step away from them? You are captain of the most successful GAA team in the country, it’s huge. Many only get one opportunity at it.”

And it’s not an armband Cooper wears lightly. However, he reverts to one of his favourite mantras when he talk of everything coming down to what you do on the field. “If I started getting involved in side issues, I have no doubt my game would suffer. But there are some things. Like, in the last year or two, the (Kerry) team has evolved a little bit, losing a lot of players and maybe some of the squad balance. I felt everyone wasn’t quite at the same pitch, and I wanted fellas to enjoy it more. We all talk about a squad from (numbers) one to 30, but it’s no fun for those fellas from 25 to 30. I’ve been trying to drill home the point that any streak of good form and a fella is back in the mix. Jack has always worked that way. I’ve tried to get that point across, whether you’re number 13 or number 28, you’ve a role to play. It’s got nothing to do with putting my own stamp on the team. The team does that itself. I wanted any fella coming in with Kerry to feel part of it, to enjoy it and to feel they were challenging the established order. It can’t be set in stone that Colm Cooper owns the number 13 jersey or Tomás Ó Sé owns the number 5.”

IN a town (Tralee) and county where you’re told to pipe down if, like Cooper, you’ve only four All-Ireland medals, he is more concerned with the here and now than a new volume of the Golden Years dvd. With good reason. Walking from his car to AIB in Tralee each morning, he can meet five fellas with more medals than him. And that’s a five minute journey.

But once in a while he’ll be driving home to Killarney and get what he calls “these mental stings”, reminding him how much Kerry has done in the last decade.

“I was talking to Pa Laide there at work about reaching six finals in a row (2004-2009). That won’t be done for a long time again. Think about it. Every year on this Saturday, you’re heading for the biggest sporting event in the country. I get these little stings: yeah, that was really good wasn’t it? That was something exceptional. This is my eighth final. People say ‘ye got soft this and that’. I don’t care, you must have some amount of quality in your side to do that. We’ve lost a wealth of experience — Seamo, Tadhg, Tommy, Darragh, Fitzy, Murph. That gets forgotten — look at what these guys have lost. Of course it has weakened us a little bit, but we keep coming back for more. That’s why I’m encouraged about the future, and I think it gets lost out there.”

By Kerry people or further afield? “Argh, the demands of Kerry people. Like, Cork winning the All-Ireland last year, after we getting knocked out in the quarters, actually takes you down three pegs in this county. Not a peg, three pegs. It’s a triple whammy for Kerry people: ‘how could you put them up as a great team, didn’t Cork come along and pick up a soft All-Ireland and there was no sign of them?’

“Everything I’ve won is kinda on the line again on Sunday,” he deadpans. “It’s like putting all your chips down in the casino again. I don’t think there’s any other county where that can be said. If Mayo won an All-Ireland this year and did nothing for the next 30, those players would be living legends. The Freedom of Castlebar. I suppose it’s just the nature of how driven everyone is here when it comes to football.”

So tonight he’ll park up outside Dublin for the eighth September Saturday with his crew, the new Kerry crew. The breakthoughs, Maher, Enright, Kieran O’Leary. The old hands. Declan, Mahony, Galvin, Tom Sull. Botty will gee them up, Jack will bring them down. It’s the Stadium dressing room in Killarney, only with nicer doorknobs.

“I keep saying it. It comes down always to doing it on the pitch. You can be the most flamboyant fella in the dressing room or you can sit in the corner and say nothing. I don’t mind. It’s all about performing on the big day. When. It. Matters.

In Kerry, that’s always what you are judged on.”