'I'm no stranger to controversy' - Every word from Jack O'Connor's first presser as Kerry manager
Jack O'Connor pictured at a press conference in Austin Stack GAA Park Tralee Co Kerry on his return as the manager of the Kerry senior footballers for a third time. Picture: Domnick Walsh
There was a five-man committee that deemed me the best candidate. To go back to the podcast, I've addressed that a few times already today. There's too much made of that. It was a question I was asked at the end of the podcast.
The podcast was about analysing the Kerry-Tyrone game. I think Paul Rouse asked me something along the lines of, kind of compare managing Kerry to managing Kildare. I think that was the question. I said, 'Sure of course there's an attraction in managing Kerry but you'd be better prepared for plenty flak because there's huge pressure in the job.'
And I gave the example of myself in winning three All-Irelands in four years and still getting plenty grief. I said managing in a place like Kildare is an easier job because the expectations are lower. But sure look people take what they want out of your comments. I wasn't overly happy the way it was portrayed in the paper.
In fact I wasn't happy at all and I think the (sports) editor of the paper is present and he knows about that. He got the brunt of my ire a day or two later and his ears are still ringing.
But look, that's fair enough. Maybe I was a bit naive to make the comment I did but people interpreted that as me advertising myself for the Kerry job. There wasn't the Kerry job there to be advertising for at the time. To say that there was conspiracy theories out there is an understatement. But to be honest with you, that's done and dusted as far as I'm concerned. I just want to be positive and move on.
At the end of the day, this is a big job. It's a responsible job. I'd consider this winter talk when there isn't a whole lot happening in the GAA world outside of club matches.
And I'm no stranger to controversy. When I came in, in 2004 the first year, it wasn't without its difficulties. So look I'm in the job now, I'm looking forward to it, it's a big challenge but I feel I have the energy and the enthusiasm to go after the job with everything that I have.
But that's not exactly true. You see there's a bit of a misconception there. If you want, I'll clarify that.
The situation in Kildare was I more or less had my mind made up when we were beaten in the Leinster final. In fact, if you're reading body language in the dressing room after the game, you would say I was quite emotional in the dressing room because I'd a fair idea it was my last time meeting that bunch of players or addressing them.
I was very well treated in Kildare, I had a great time up there. The people couldn't have been more welcoming, the people I worked with, the county board, the players and we'd a right good time there and so on.
But I was finding the almost nine-hour round journey was taking a huge toll on me and even people close to me would have remarked around that time that I'd lost a lot of weight and so on, that I couldn't afford to lose, I'm fairly skinny as it is.
It was taking a big toll on me. But I had such respect for the people up there that I said I'd give it a couple weeks just to make sure I was making the right decision.
The other thing that people don't realise actually is, and this hasn't come out, and I'm glad to have the opportunity to bring it out, I didn't have a management team any more up there. Virtually the whole management team had broken up and if you want me to go into specifics I can.
Ross Dunphy the S&C guy was going abroad with the Army for three years. Brian Murphy was going abroad three days a week due to work with Dawn Meats. My coach Emmet McDonnell had just got a principal job in (St) Mary's Edenderry which is a big school and he was going to find it difficult to commit, even my physio was opting out because of family reasons. So I literally didn't have a management left except for Tom Cribbin, one of my selectors.
That was going to be a huge factor. I didn't feel I had the energy to go putting another management team together, a couple of hundred miles from home, with facing that journey.
You have to remember as well that last season, for me anyway, was four months, April to August. I found that tough. You're looking at the coming seasons which is going to be more than double that, at least. So that was a big thing.
The other thing people mightn't realise is I had a big incentive to go to Kildare in the first place because my two sons were up there, they were playing with Moorefield. That is why I went in the first place, I got involved with the Moorefield club and we won a couple of county titles and a Leinster club. They had decided they were coming home, they had a good time during the lockdown down at home with their mother so they decided to cut their ties with Kildare and come home. So that link was gone, as well. So I had a load of reasons, personal reasons, for not continuing [with Kildare].
How could I commit if I hadn't even a management? I know there have been a lot of stories, a lot of conspiracy theories going around. If you want to check any of the stuff out, go and talk to the chairman of the Kildare County Board, he will tell you exactly where I was. I was struggling big time with committing big to 2022 because I literally couldn't see how I was going to have the energy to keep that drive [round trip from Kerry to Kildare] going.
Coaching an inter-county team nowadays, or managing them, is a tough job. If you throw eight or nine hours on top of that, it becomes virtually an impossible job long-term.
This thing that I left Kildare because I was asked to manage Kerry or that it was a done deal is absolute and total nonsense, and it was addressed well by the chairman of the county board at the meeting on Monday. I want to absolutely second that because that is the truth.
It is well known that the county board were hoping I'd stay on. They had their own reasons for putting out that statement that I can't really get into, if you know what I mean. To say that I had a management team in place and that was I committing to 2022 was a big stretch because I didn't have a management team in place. I am after spelling it out that out of my whole management there was one selector left. That is the God's honest truth.
I'd have been down in Waterville playing golf and walking my dog in Ballinskellig beach, and I was 100% reconciled to doing that because the toll that that driving was taking on me was just too much. I was told by several people close to me that I was fairly shook by the time I finished with Kildare.
I want to put on record how appreciative I was to get the opportunity to manage Kildare. It is a great footballing county. There is a latent support that maybe wasn't apparent, and maybe that was because of the lockdown and Covid. I will forever have fond memories of the way I was treated in Kildare and my dealings with the Kildare players and county board and the people I worked with up there.
They have a good management now in place who can bring that support back because they are four legends of the game in Kildare from Micko's time. That is my fervent wish that Kildare get back to the top table and stay at the top table.
I like being involved in the game. I still have the interest, I have the energy. More importantly, I now have the time because I am retired to put all my energies into this.
In many ways it’s a dream come true for me to get back working with the lads I worked in 2014 and ’15. It would complete the circle for me if I could bring senior success to those lads. At the end of the day that’s what it’s all about. That’s what developing a minor team is about: bringing them to senior and making winning seniors out of them. Of course that’s the ultimate aim.
I wouldn’t say that at all. I mean what right have I to manage Kerry? I see it as a privilege to manage Kerry and when anyone else is managing them I’m a supporter. That’s the way it works.
You’re not asked on a podcast to be a cheerleader. You’re asked on to analyse a game. I was out playing golf the evening before when Paul Rouse rang me and asked me on. If I’d a splink of sense I’d have said no but of course I haven’t. I went on with him the following morning and along with Oisín McConville and Kevin Walsh we were analysing a game.
My wife is always telling me I talk too much and maybe I do. I don’t weigh up every remark and wonder if some fella is going to take a certain interpretation out of this. I was asked all these questions about the game and where Kerry could have won.
I picked out a couple of areas. I didn’t think I was overly critical of Kerry management high up or low down. I said they were extremely unlucky and two of the Tyrone goals were extremely fortunate. I said it was an extremely difficult situation for the management approaching the game given the uncertainty.
If you’re preparing to play a game in three weeks and then it’s put back a week and then another, that is exceptionally difficult at the business end of the championship. Maybe if it was league or something, earlier in the season you’d roll with it. But at that time of the year when fellas are very fine-tuned, that’s a very difficult scenario and I emphasised that.
Basically I was asked a couple of tactical questions, like where did Tyrone have it over Kerry. I said their use of the ball and their ball retention. I said that Kerry hadn’t come up against as organised a defensive system and players found it hard to cope with that. It was all fair game and all analysing the game.
There’s a lot of club football to be played in Kerry between here and the middle of December. We’ll be on the lookout for players who can improve the squad. Are those players out there? I think there might be a couple out there. Are there more than a couple? That remains to be seen in the weeks ahead. The way the Kerry county championship works, there’s always a few players who put up their hands.
Am I looking for a particular type of player? I made the point that the way the game is gone these days, the middle eight is really critical to the way it’s played. Those players have to be savage athletes, Roy Keane-type players. You have to earmark certain types of players for those roles.
Are those players there? I obviously don’t know. Are there Paul Galvins and Aidan O’Mahonys out there? Paul Galvin was a one-off. They threw away the mould when they made Paul – he was just a special player. Look that’s always the challenge: to find players who fit into the kind of system that you want to play. Are they there? That remains to be seen.
I have no idea whether they are or not because I have seen no club football but I intend to watch a lot of club football over the next couple of months. We will make a decision then in conjunction with the management on who is up to it and who is not. Every year you are involved with a squad you are certainly looking to strengthen that squad and bring a bit of freshness to the squad and bring in players who you think will develop, not just older players but I am talking about younger players as well that you see something in, that you think will develop in the proper environment.
You know when you are in the game what coaches are good, what coaches are average and I would have admired Paddy for a while. I have got to know him better over the past couple of years because we (Kildare) have played Down about four times. We have exchanged… they have come down and we have travelled up.
Paddy is just a very clever coach and he has a lot of experience. He has been to three or four different counties, he just happens to be available because he is on a work sabbatical. I think we are very lucky to have him on board because he is just a very intelligent clever, organised guy who will bring something to Kerry that we haven’t got.
I think it’s always good to go outside the county because you are experiencing different cultures and different ways of looking at the game. Kildare played their football in Division 2 for the last couple of years where teams tend to set up very defensively. There is a great challenge in that trying to break that down and trying to get your own game going at the same time.
So I am delighted that I went outside the county for a couple of years and I learned a lot in Kildare and sometimes you have to go outside of your own place to really appreciate the game and the way it's developing.
Sure that is always the danger but at the moment it’s a good thing that players are playing as much football as they are because they were locked up long enough and training for long enough so I think now they are just anxious to play football. So I don’t think they see it as a burden to be playing this time of the year or late into the season. I think they enjoy the games more than training. They had a lot of training done behind closed doors and all the rest of it so I think they are happy enough to be playing games.
He had a lot of potential. The last game that I managed him or the second last game was out here in Austin Stack Park, where he was full-back against Cork marking that big guy who went to Australia, Mark Keane, and he got Man of the Match that evening and finished up getting Munster player of the year in 2018.
He has fantastic athleticism but he has been away from the game for two or three years and it remains to be seen has he still got the ball skills. I am looking forward to watching him playing with his club Na Gaeil in the next week or so just to see if he has retained the ball-handling skills because it is just not as easy as people think it is.
When Tadgh Kennelly came up it took him quite a while to get to grips with the round ball again. It remains to be seen. Has he got the athleticism, the raw physique to play at the top level, one hundred percent but it comes down to ball skills, decision-making and stuff like that.
That’s the immediate backroom team I suppose but there’s another team behind that in the sports science areas and other logistical areas so that’s not quite finalised yet, to answer your questions.
Sure of course, you’d love if you could close the circle by bringing lads from that age group right through and make seniors out of them and ultimately to try and manage them as seniors and win something with them is the ultimate dream, of course it is, yeah.
Look, to be honest with you, I haven’t done much thinking about it and I would need to consult with Tim there and the county board and players as well but my instinct is telling me that on the face of it, it looks like plan B is the best option.
But I’m not so sure that it’s going to get through because in the provinces where the provincial championship is very competitive, they’re going to be slow letting that go because with that proposed plan the provincial championships would be maybe akin to the pre-season tournaments like the McGrath Cup and the McKenna Cup and so on. I’m not disparaging them now or anything but if they’re not linked to the Championship they will lose some of their lustre so I’m not too sure any of those proposals are going to get through, to be honest. But as regards a preference I’d need to consult with the county board and the players because this has to be a collaborative thing.
Ah look, if I was giving them a message I’d be giving it to them privately. Look, teams are always… it’s always a case of having a mix. It’s never black and white. You want a good mix of experience, fellas in the mid-20s and some younger fellas coming through. The experience that these fellas have built up over the years and the leadership that they develop, you can’t suddenly just throw that into the waste paper basket and we’re going to have a clean sweep here. It doesn’t work like that. You have to talk to these people and just see do they have something left to offer. Is there stuff still left in them? Then it’s a collaborative thing. If they say they’re mad for road and you see them going well in club matches and whatever, sure there isn’t a debate then. So that remains to be seen. I literally haven’t seen these guys even playing club football yet and I look forward to doing it in the next few weeks.
“I was involved in ‘97 when it was won after 11 years and that was a ferocious famine altogether. I was a selector with Páidí. Sure the natives always get anxious down here when you’re not winning it and every year the pressure ramps up a bit but I think one of the aims that I’d be having and the management would be having is to try and dampen down the pressure.
We all have our own expectations but sometimes we put too much pressure on players. They’re amateur players. They have to try and enjoy the game, they have to try and enjoy the whole process and sometimes I think we’re awful demanding here and we keep ramping up the pressure and I think the more we do that, the less the chances are that fellas perform so we’ll be trying to come up with ways of keeping the heat off players. I don’t mind taking a bit of heat myself if it deflects off players but to answer your question, there’s always expectation down here, of course there is. The longer it goes on, the expectation keeps ramping up.
Ah look, look, everybody doesn’t come through from minor teams. There is a very good sprinkling between the ‘14 and ‘15 minors that have come through. There’s probably more than 10 knocking around the place, a dozen at least. You won’t get every minor through. I think they’ve done well to… I didn’t even realise it until I was looking at the Tyrone game, the goalkeeper Shane Ryan and five out of the six backs were from those two teams. The only defender who didn’t come through the ‘14 and ‘15 minors was Paul Murphy. All the rest of them were from those two teams and I actually didn’t realise it until I looked at them out on the field so that’s great going, that is really good going and it means that the system is working down here, the players are being developed and are coming through the system and I think that’s very heartening.
The only thing I’d say to you, you’re watching teams that I’ve been involved in for many’s a long day, are you? How far back?
You’d want to go back a bit further. I was involved in the Kerry techs in ‘92 and ‘93. So look, look, what kind of football do you think those teams played starting then and all the way up? So I’m hardly going to change at this hour of my life and go all defensive.
Listen, sure of course that narrative will be out there. I’m managing the team. My old friend Johnny Culloty said to me one time, he said, ‘Jack, it’s not enough just to win in Kerry, you’ve to win with a bit of style’. That’ll be our intention.
Look, I was involved with Diarmuid (Murphy) before. Very, very solid guy. Great head for the game. He was involved with the Dingle club so he’s at the coalface. Very calm character. Very bright guy. Mike (Quirke) has a lot of experience. He’s a coach with the Kerry county board, a GDA. He’s had experience of managing his club team down here and managing an inter-county team and he will bring a lot to the table as well and it only occurred to me the other day that there will be three current inter-county managers in my set-up — I was managing myself, Mike was managing and Paddy was managing. We’re bound to have learned something unless we’re very dim.
I would openly admit that when I went in in 2004, I felt under ferocious pressure because of the man I was replacing. I was replacing a legend like Páidí, who’d won eight All-Irelands on the field and two more on the sideline. And I’d been involved with him for those two All-Irelands in ’97 and 2000.
For different reasons, I felt under a lot of pressure to win that year. I know I didn’t have a great start now, got beaten in my first League game above in Longford, which was a bad start. But we happened to turn it around and we did pretty well after that, we won the League and the Championship.
I think that I’m better able to keep things in perspective now. I don’t take criticism as personally as I used to that time. I’m not saying that I like criticism, but I can deal better with it. I’d be a bit more thick-skinned than I used to be. And I now know the areas where you need to direct your energy.
I think I was going into a lot of areas when I first became manager that really weren’t that productive from the point of view of helping the team or whatever. I don’t want to go into too much detail there, but you learn techniques over the years.
There’s a saying that you get 80% of your results from 20% of your effort. And you need to know where to plug in to that effort. I’ve even found out in the last few years that you get ferocious gains from man-managing players, from spending time talking to players one on one.
I would have done a good bit of that in Kildare and I feel it worked dividends. And I feel now that I have the time to spend doing that kind of work. Because it’s a tough environment. Particularly in Kerry for players. There’s all kind of expectation and they have their own issues and sometimes just sitting down with somebody and letting them tell you what their issues are, suddenly you know them better as people. Not just players that you see three or four times a week.
So I think I’ve a better perspective on things. I’ve a better handle on where to direct my energy to get the best results.
I didn’t even think of it like that. Yeah, they were champions in ’03 and ’08. Look I wouldn’t be too sure now that Dublin are gone anywhere. They could regroup next year. They still have a core of very good players, the Brian Fentons, the Ciaran Kilkennys, the Con O’Callaghans, these fellas, they’re going nowhere for a while.
And they obviously have a couple of players outside the panel that would really help them like Jack McCaffrey and Paul Mannion and those fellas. So I don’t believe Dublin are gone anywhere. They could regroup and come very strong next year.
Tyrone, believe it or not, in my head, could be even better next year. Because if you think about it, they had disruptions this year with Covid and all that. And the confidence it will give them having won the All-Ireland, they could be better again next year.
Then there are other teams in Ulster, the Armaghs, the Donegals, the Monaghans, they’re all very dangerous teams that could come strong. And obviously Galway had a disappointing enough season, but there’s a lot of talent in Galway. And obviously Mayo are always going to be there.
So this is never a one- or a two-horse race. I think the Championship is more competitive now than it’s been in quite a few years.
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