Constant setbacks 'testing' but Diarmuid O'Connor is ready to lead Kingdom to glory

LEARNER TO LEADER: Diarmuid O'Connor during the Kerry GAA Football Pre-All-Ireland Senior Final media conference at Gleneagle Hotel in Killarney. Pic: David Fitzgerald/Sportsfile

93 minutes. 93 minutes across a nine-game campaign. Absent for six of them, removed from a seventh after just three minutes. One full outing and one cameo.

To get very mathematical about it and to present his numbers in as catching a form as possible, Diarmuid O’Connor had involvement in just 14% of Kerry’s 2025 championship run.

Go wider and deeper again. When you consider the initial shoulder injury occurred during Round 6 of the League at home to Armagh, finishing there and then his spring casting, those 93 minutes mentioned at the outset cover an 11-game period.

Bit-part and left behind on the long road to Croker.

Skip ahead to last Saturday afternoon. Diarmuid O’Connor, his square jaw, and towering frame arrive into the Mangerton Room at Killarney’s Europe Hotel. Listening to him outline the shitshow that was his 2025 struggle, that 93 minutes were managed at all was mightily impressive.

The situation was so laughably brutal that he was in danger of popping out his right shoulder when rolling over in bed asleep.

“I landed on it in the first half and might have jarred it a small bit,” the 27-year old explains of the original meeting with misfortune on March 15 of last year.

“In the second-half, I landed awkwardly on it, with my elbow directly underneath my shoulder, and it just came out from there.” 

He missed the subsequent spin to Salthill. He missed the League final. He missed the Munster campaign. He started and lasted their All-Ireland opener against Roscommon. A first start in 68 days was a false dawn. He missed the win over Cork and shellacking by Meath.

He sorted himself out sufficiently to earn selection for the Cavan preliminary quarter-final. He sorted himself out for a three-minute role and injury relapse. It was the 50th minute of the concluding afternoon before we saw the Gael Coláiste Chiarraí secondary school teacher again.

“The second dislocation was during an A v B game in Currans before the Cork game. It just popped out that weekend, and then it went again against Cavan. So yeah, timing wasn’t great.” 

Neither was the fallout.

O'Connor, left, is embraced by Jason Foley after the Dublin semi-final at Croke Park. Pic: Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile

Constant chasing. Constant detachment from the group.

As his teammates strolled out onto the hard sod at Currans and Fitzgerald Stadium, O’Connor slumped into the gym to strengthen and sellotape up that misbehaving shoulder.

What teammates were getting up to beyond the walls of his rehab prison plagued his thoughts. But the cruel reality of sport is that beyond the Kerry medical team, nobody - not even those same teammates - were thinking of him. Their focus was on their jersey and whatever crowd would be standing opposite them the following Saturday or Sunday.

Within Jack O’Connor’s dressing-room, the head of the midfield department had become an irrelevant, almost forgotten island.

“It was difficult. I felt I was playing really well, enjoying the kick-outs with the new rules and all those kinds of things. You take that set-back, and you try to take the positives from it. When it happens again, it’s a small bit more difficult to get over. When it happens a third time, it’s obviously very testing,” O’Connor continued.

“The shoulder is a funny one in that it can feel perfect, but you can roll over in the bed and it could pop out.” 

There was not a bit funny about the uninvited isolation.

“No matter what anyone says, you’re not on the field, you’re not training, you’re not involved in those conversations on the field. So it can be difficult at times. You just have to understand that’s part of the process and when you do get back in the group, you just have to make the most of it then. And take your chance when you are back on the field.”

Surgery was performed on October 2. Thereafter followed six months of further rehab. An entire League campaign missed. That’s now 93 minutes across 19 consecutive Kerry games. A full stop put at the end of this sorry chapter on April 25 above in Ennis. Only his third inter-county start in 13 months.

“The Wednesday after the league final this year, I trained fully,” he said of finally scratching his name from its year-long residency on the injury list.

“We were going off to camp then, so that was always my target to make the camp. Initially, we were given a timeframe that you might be back for a later stage of a league game, but the way the shoulder was recovering, and I had a bit of a groin issue as well that I had to take care of, we decided that the training camp would be a really, really good target and would set my stall then for the rest of the year.

“I’ve had a clear run of it since that first championship game against Clare.” Sunday will be his fifth final involvement. The 2019 replay against Dublin was his first. The then 20-year-old was thrown in at half-forward having not featured in either the drawn fixture, semi-final, or last of the Super 8 outings.

“When you come in at that age, I was playing without fear, playing on instinct. Whereas then you kind of pick up lots of tactical bits and pieces and I might have struggled with that.

“Football-wise, I was probably okay in ‘19, but maybe the mental and tactical side of it, I probably struggled with, in terms of just getting up to the level that all the other boys were at.” 

Shoulder sorted, the once learning teenager is now a leader.