Darran O'Sullivan: ‘When you’re feeling confident you’ll try things’

MUNSTER SFC FINAL: Cork v Kerry.

With it, he offered his own caption: “I’ve been told this, but I don’t care.”

Maybe it’s because he was born and spent some of his formative years in London but O’Sullivan isn’t an archetypal Kerry player. Give him a song and he’ll sing it like he means it.

Ger “put me down for what I said last year” Power would approve of his football but his openness? It wouldn’t matter a jot to the man. Besides, Twitter is inhabited by more of the Cork team likely to line out in Killarney on Sunday week than those who should start for Kerry.

“When Twitter came out first I tweeted about anything — ‘the leaves outside are green’, ‘I’m having a cup of tea’,” he laughs. “It was new, it was exciting or whatever but then it became bigger and you have to become a bit cuter.

“We’d have a couple of good fellas on our team who would catch you out so you had to shape up pretty quick but I’d rarely comment negatively about football or talk about Kerry. I enjoy it, I’m always having the craic.

“I think you can have good banter with supporters. You’d have the odd fecking dope who just wants to send you abuse just to get a reply back.”

You’d find it hard to think of a Kerry player who is friendlier with lads from other county teams. A sign of weakness? Hardly. But when it comes to the media he minds his Ps and Qs. He pre-empts a question about having to be a little wiser with his generosity. “Naive? I was when I was younger.”

Last year, he admits he was burnt by a headline in a national newspaper which read: “I spend so much training, I’ve no time for a girlfriend.”

“He [the journalist] was home and I was told it was an interview on nutrition and what I do before games in terms of food and whatever. Then he just asked me about alcohol and I said I go out after games and whatever. He said ‘what about the pressure of having a girlfriend not being able to go out’ and I said I was single so there’s no pressure.

“He said ‘oh yeah’ and I said it’s hard to get one when you don’t go out. It was a passing comment, only a bit of craic.

“The next thing I get a phone call from the boys driving up to Dublin and they’re laughing. I was thick enough with it because I had done the guy a favour with the interview and was being screwed like this. In fairness to him, he rang me but I wouldn’t take his calls for ages. He was leaving voice-mails saying he didn’t write the headline. I won’t be talking about women anymore!”

What O’Sullivan paid no heed to was the negative reaction in some quarters to his forthright view about the direction football is taking. Claiming the best footballers aren’t the best players anymore irked a few.

“That was my opinion. Some people were going to agree with it, some people weren’t. The people who didn’t agree with it? Fine. I didn’t care. The people who tweeted me back [disagreeing]? I didn’t care. My opinion was ‘if I cared I would probably be following you back’. I didn’t care.

“Some people frowned upon it as it was something against Donegal but it wasn’t. It wasn’t that they were the only ones doing it. I’d be on night out in Dublin and people would come up and say ‘oh, you were slating Donegal’ but I never mentioned Donegal once.”

As far as his own football goes, it’s only in recent weeks that O’Sullivan has felt back to himself again after an issue last year was diagnosed as a hamstring problem when it was actually a lower back/hip injury.

“I had to monitor my training during the league and when you’re not training much you don’t feel fit and confidence isn’t great. You’re just getting by games. When you’re feeling confident you’ll try things and you’ll do things without even thinking, second nature.”

He’s noticed how Kerry and Cork have almost been forgotten as people have clamoured to heap praise on Donegal, Dublin and Mayo.

“Cork are very similar to ourselves in that they don’t care. I’m sure Dublin, Mayo and Donegal don’t care that people are talking about them. We’re not really worried about anyone at the moment. If people are blowing us up, leave them at it, if they’re shooting us down, leave them at it.”

For most of the league, he was the oldest player in the forward line and it’s given him a sense of what role he has to play now.

“In terms of leadership, you can be judged two ways — you can be the fella shouting and roaring or you could be the fella who wants the ball when you’re a couple of points down. I tend to try and get on the ball as much as I can.

“That comes from experience but also feeding off other fellas like the Declans and the Goochs. You’ve seen them doing it for so long from the outskirts and eventually you kinda go, “I wanna take the pressure off them a small bit. I’m 27, not a young fella anymore.”