Unrest in Kerry GAA: Too many lads with too much to say

Former Kerry manager Peter Keane. Picture: INPHO/James Crombie

“One great thing about Kerry footballers,” former GAA president Sean Kelly tweeted last week: “They’ve never got involved in hiring or firing of managers. They leave that to the County Board and they concentrate on playing. Admirable!”

Other counties, some nearby, might counter that it’s easy for those football lads in the Kingdom to maintain a respectable distance from the political rotor blades when they walk on rose petals and have every requirement attended to. But Kelly, a former Kerry chairman himself, is broadly correct in the tradition of Kerry men doing their talking on grass.

And doing so with a sense of style and good grace.

It seems some time since Kerry employed those good manners and ideals as they deliberated on the opportunity of a direct, if morally questionable, passage through to the All-Ireland final at the expense of a Covid-ravaged Tyrone squad. As counterfeit as it might sound to some, there remained a very clear sense in the county that Kerry had to do right by their opponents and decline an All-Ireland semi-final win by default.

There has been nothing as refined about the circus surrounding the appointment of a management team to the county’s footballers for the next two years — or from the delegates of the county who gathered via video link at Monday night’s Board meeting to discuss same. It has been a bloody, occasionally grubby episode with too many vested interests having too much to say for themselves — some of it bordering on slanderous — as the ratification process of Jack O’Connor moved closer.

Good folk get wounded in the collateral damage from a process that has been mischievously misinterpreted from the moment a terse statement confirmed that Peter Keane was neither being re-appointed without competition or removed from his position as Kerry football manager.

When Keane launched a judiciously timed scud in the direction of the group that eventually relieved him of his Kerry managership last Friday, his insistence that ‘all the players’ had expressed a strong preference for his management to be retained next season raised eyebrows.

To put it mildly.

Reaction to his statement — which had the whiff of corporate communications off it — has been mixed generally, but it provoked a queasy reaction amongst a playing squad uncomfortable the process has played out so publicly and that it might come across as an attempt to use them to court public sympathy. The Kerry players, or certainly a representative sample of same, were happy for Keane to stay on for a fourth season in charge as long as explicitly expressed improvements were made to the set up for 2022.

One was the introduction of a new coaching voice to the management ticket. The players have griped privately that Donie Buckley wasn’t replaced with a like-for-like alternative this season. Shafting one of the country’s leading coaches is one thing; doing nought to fill the Buckley-shaped hole quite another. As the man in situ facing a challenge, Keane surely knew he required some fresh thinking for the 2022 renewal.

It was late in coming.

Another issue for the players is the involvement of (or lack of) a proper, qualified sports psychologist with the squad. Kerry players, like others, have watched enviously the benefit of Caroline Currid’s spell with the Limerick hurlers and believe such an input could prove transformative to their autumn ambitions. There is a subtle but very real difference between a squad content with a set-up and one aware that a new direction could enhance their prospects of success. The notion of a player telling someone he/she is happy enough is a facile one when the questioner is the status quo.

Keane’s three years in charge of the Kerry senior footballers will most likely result in a hung jury when prosecuted in the fullness of time. If it had its disastrous moments, it has also been plenty of spring sunshine and was improving this season in terms of coherence. He could never be accused of being a lucky general and even if some of his battlefield wounds were self-inflicted, his players must recognise too that they let themselves down at critical junctures in big games.

Though Kerry only lost the 2019 final to Dublin after a replay, it was an unsettled campaign in terms of behind-the-scenes logistics, a consequence of Keane’s decision to bring his extended backroom team with him from the Kerry minor set-up and jettison Eamonn Fitzmaurice’s senior structure. The irony of Keane’s disappointment about the Board’s “decision to end the work we had started and the momentum we had built” is not hard to spot.

Though there’s been some nonsense regarding the delay of a ‘thank you’ to Keane since the County Board set the clock on the process (of which Keane was a part, of course), there is sympathy for a management group that invested so readily into an effort that has come up tantalisingly short in two of the three years. Maurice Fitzgerald is a deity in the Kingdom, and Tommy Griffin has been a loyal and hard-working assistant to the manager. Ditto James Foley. All have put their lives on hold for this.

However, the notion that the failures come down to losing by a point by Tyrone in extra-time conveniently ignores the fact the special sub committee charged with proposing the next Kerry manager had to examine Keane’s term in the whole, over three seasons since 2019.

The Kerry chairman at the sharp end of this soap opera found himself explaining in detail the process and timeline of Keane’s departure, and batting away accusations of a conflict of interest, at Monday night’s Board meeting. Tim Murphy detailed how Keane was kept abreast at every stage of the competitive process of selecting a management team. The chairman “totally rejected” accusation of being disrespectful to Keane and said the conflict of interest claims were “totally out of hand”.

“I can (also) categorically state that no leaks of any description came from the sub-committee. It was one of the most tightly-knit groups I was every involved in. Such an inference is erroneous and driven by factors outside our control, people who had an axe to grind and are looking to sully the reputation of Kerry GAA.”

There remained an undercurrent of frustration among Board delegates who watched the competition play out on their phones. A sense too that Keane might have departed with a greater depth of goodwill without his unwise intervention last Friday. It wouldn’t require a Masters in Conspiracy Theory to conclude it would make last night’s ratification of O’Connor more disruptive.

Were Keane that exercised about the wellbeing of Kerry football, he might have been better counselled to delay his frustrations to later this week. Not for the first time, O’Connor will return to a Kerry dressing room of players bent out of shape.

Not by Tyrone, but by their own.