O’Connor: There’s plenty left in the tank

Jack O’Connor has been given no indication by his Kerry team that they are on the wane.

Ahead of Sunday’s round two qualifier trip to Mullingar, he reports the panel’s reaction to the Cork defeat has been impressive.

“Training has been going pretty well,” he said.

“We gave them a week off after the Cork game and we’re hoping we can now get our game together because a lot of work has been put into it. The game will be the proof.

“We feel ourselves that there is stuff left in the team. The only gauge I have for that is the way the players have applied themselves in training.

“You’d know yourself if things were wrong. They’d be showing they’re sick of training and not applying themselves but I can’t see any of that. There is a desire in them to better themselves.”

Some of the pundits’ reaction to Kerry surrendering their 2011 Munster title could be judged as pessimistic with RTÉ’s Martin Carney describing June 10 as “the day the music died” for some of the team’s established players.

O’Connor is only interested in controlling the controllables.

“I don’t get into that stuff, whether it’s over-reacting or whose wondering whether we’re finished.

“We’re our own biggest critics. We wouldn’t have been happy with the way we played and we didn’t need to be told. How other people saw us is irrelevant to us and we wouldn’t get too het up about that.

“Things that go on outside the camp don’t really affect us. There are people paid to give their opinion and that’s their prerogative. We wouldn’t be influenced by that.

“Above any year, fellas are looking forward to this match and it’s now a case of putting all the good work done into action.”

As for the fallout from Páirc Uí Chaoimh in Kerry, O’Connor isn’t too perturbed about how the performance and result was seen in the county.

“It’s always doom and gloom in Kerry when you lose a match. There was doom and gloom after losing the league match to Armagh even though we’d beaten Dublin the week before.

“We wouldn’t have taken much notice of that. We can only concentrate on ourselves and getting our game in order and that’s what we have been doing.”

O’Connor isn’t keen to look back at the defeat to Cork as a lost opportunity. He felt Kerry were deservedlybeaten.

“I know we had goal chances but things were a bit frantic and frenetic. There were a lot of bodies around and they wouldn’t have been clear-cut in my opinion. We simply didn’t play well enough to win the game and Cork won comprehensively in the end.

“We had to go back to basics and get those things right. It’s not a case of worrying about the opposition but making sure you have your ‘A’ game going and that’s what we’ve been doing.”

It gives O’Connor no solace either that Kerry have never lost an All-Ireland qualifier. His own record, having gone through the backdoor in 2006, ’08 and ’09 reads played four, won four, but he is taking little of that with him to Mullingar.

“Certainly, in the qualifiers in ’09 we could have lost two if not three of them. We had a battle in all those games. Playing away from home, you have to be wary. Westmeath have a good record in Mullingar, there’ll have a big partisan crowd and will be up for us. We’d be foolish to look beyond Sunday. We’re going to try and take what we’ve been doing on the training field into the game.

“It’s a dangerous game — any of these away qualifiers are. Who would say Armagh would have been beaten by Roscommon when Roscommon showed no form before that?

“There’ll be a crowd of 8,000 to 10,000 people in Mullingar, things will be claustrophobic and things can go wrong. It’s how the players react in that atmosphere that will decide it.”