Kerry selector James Costello: 'Jack earned his corn dealing with fragmented squad'
Kerry selector James Costello during the pre-All-Ireland Senior Final media conference at Gleneagle Hotel in Killarney. Pic: David Fitzgerald/Sportsfile
FRAGMENTED was the word Kerry coach and selector James Costello used, and it’s as good as any to describe the bus depot ins-and-outs that was Kerry’s spring and early summer lot.
The Kingdom’s brains trust is ‘blue in the face’ from listening to manager, Jack O’Connor’s megaphone diplomacy on the issue of too many club football championships in the second half of the year. And the consequence of same for their inter-county roster.
The first half of this year, though, took the biscuit. And then to compound problems, Kerry’s Algarve training camp yielded up another few problems, not least a serious foot problem for Sean O’Shea.
“We’d fellas coming back in every week, every two weeks, new bodies coming into the building,” Costello recalled this week.
“Jack earned his corn this year as a manager and I think his experience was huge just in terms of managing that. A lot of other counties play their championship, they get an off-season and they all come back together, whereas we had fellas coming in dribs and drabs and we were managing their return-to-play - when to press on with a player because we needed a league point or two and when to back off. That was the most challenging thing for this year.”
For his own part, Jack O'Connor is kindling the debate for the winter months. It's not just a question of getting the county's GAA CEO Peter Twiss onside. Said O'Connor: "It's not up to Peter Twiss. There needs to be a sit-down between all the interested parties here. Something has to give. I've been saying this for a while. It's not like I'm selfish and I want to grab the players just to play inter-county. I know the club thing has to go on.
"But we're playing three club championships down here. Every other county are playing one. And yet we're expected then to be competitive in the National League in January, when there just isn't enough time to rest fellas properly and to get them back up to fitness properly. I just feel that something's going to have to give. It may be the National League if the club situation continues. You may just have to take the hit in the National League."
It will surprise some if not most outside the county that nearly all Kerry managers limit their spring priorities to staying in Division One of the National League. Some reasons are obvious and tradition-based, others more technical.
Explained Costello, seen by those in the know as a live candidate to replace O'Connor as manager: “In Division 1 there's a huge variation of styles you’re exposed to that set you up well for the Championship. It's not the pace of the game or anything like that, it's just the different styles you come across. So it was a good campaign. We do an awful lot of heavy lifting in the league in terms of our coaching, reviews, previews. So, it was a good campaign in terms of learnings that we brought into Championship.
“There’s three distinct phases in the year now. The league is what it is, rain and wind and the rules, you see the best and the worst of the rules with the two-pointers and the kick-outs becoming a major issue, you're piking out kick-outs and it's long kick-outs and breaking ball and two-pointers. Then you have the provincial championships and the early rounds of the All-Ireland which is kind of something in between.
"The ground is starting to harden up but you have a bit of variation in the play and then you get to Croke Park in the middle of the summer with the sun shining and it's a completely different game again. So after the defeat to Donegal and the couple of weeks before the Kildare game was a good reset for us to get into summer football. You can't really kick the ball or move the ball like we want to, so we needed that reset to bring our A-game back to the fore.”
Helping iron out those temporal creases is Portugal. Or at least it usually does. Indicators were that the Easter trip to affluent Quinta do Lago wasn’t quite the restorative balm needed. But it still had considerable advantages, Costello points out.
“We carried a lot of injuries into the trip off the league - we played the league final and flew out the week after so we had a lot of mini groups going on over there and then we picked up a couple of knocks. But just in terms of time spent together, a lot of the heavy lifting, tactically, is done in the meeting rooms; it's done over a cup of coffee, so it's really good from that point of view and just changing the mindset into summer football.
"It's a mental and a physical thing but we did pick up knocks and, again, you'd have to credit the boss. I thought he did a very good job of managing the whole group. He has a reference bank in his head of similar situations that he can default to lead us through it.”
The gradual return to play of Sean O’Shea accelerated to a full-blown revival of his former self in the semi-final against Dublin. From quarter-final passenger to conductor in a moment. How?
“There are some fellas who are just a bit different,” Costello nods. “Like before the Munster final in Cork last year, Seanie hadn't laced the boots in maybe 10 weeks. There are very few fellas that have that capacity to hit the ground running, but I suppose it's part of the reason why Seánie is regarded so highly within the group.
“(His fiancée) Molly is a physio (Stephen O’Brien’s sister, as it happens) and she's his physio round the clock. I don't think anyone really knows how much effort Seánie put into it, but you just know you don't have to even consider it. Everything will be done to the nth degree and more. And then when he got back in the pitch, you're trying to hold him back really for his own good. There were times he looked tired (against Dublin) and he just finds a way to dig it out.”
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