Jack O'Connor: Kerry got burned once before. That left a bit of scar tissue
Clinton/sportsfile Against Shauna Jack At Croke Park Kerry O'connor Derry Pic: During Final Pensive: The Manager Sfc Quarter
JACK O’Connor and Kerry were never going to move unimpeded onto an All-Ireland SFC final four without poking through the entrails of that damned Derry quarter-final. With Gaelic football in the dock, O’Connor’s good manners in meeting media on Monday presented the forum for further discussion on the state of the game.
When we left him in the media room in the bowels of Croke Park over a week ago, he said folk were living on the outer realms of sanity if they thought success went hand-in-hand with a pick-up sort of game, free-wheeling and fancy. Having watched their 0-15 to 0-10 victory back, he wasn’t minded to change in that respect, but conceded Kerry weren't exactly at full throttle themselves.
Though, he explained, there might be historical reasons for such conservatism.
“I am well aware it was a very unattractive game, he reasoned. “Could we be better against that kind of set up? Absolutely. But remember, Kerry have got burned in the past against teams that set up like that.
“That set up is completely designed for you to give away the ball and the opposition to hit you on the counter attack. It’s not a huge surprise that our players were a bit conservative, maybe a bit too careful at times with the ball. And maybe that aggravated people.”
He added: “Remember it’s only 2021 that Kerry came up against a similar set up against Tyrone in an All-Ireland semi-final, and had 33 turnovers and conceded three goals in that game. When you’ve been burned like that in the past ,it does possibly leave a bit of scar tissue.
“I am not saying we are tactical geniuses (now). Go back again to that game in 2021, before this management took over, you can’t keep giving the ball back to the opposition like that and not expect to get punished for it.
"That (episode) informed a lot of our coaching in the couple of years since. The game has changed. Sure we would love to kick the ball first time into David Clifford, we’d love to kick in a few high ones. It’s not living in the real world to expect us to be bombing the ball in like 2004 when we had Johnny Crowley, Dara O Cinnéide and Kieran Donaghy. A lot of the times they were one on one in there.”
The sense that something not dissimilar awaits Kerry in Saturday’s semi-final is Armagh does not demand a stretch of imagination, but O’Connor wasn’t about to start advising the opposition how to milk their cows.
“I am not going to criticise any teams for setting up like that, they are not breaking the rules, as they stand. People are dissatisfied with the game, and we are not overly happy with the way it is either, but we have to play what is in front of us. Teams set up in the best way to give them their best chance of winning. I presume they will be solid defensively and play on the counter attack, but who knows, they might a more attack minded game. We have to be prepared to play it both ways.
"My sense is that Kerry supporters and observers in general believe that Kerry, or any team, can come out of the blocks and play barnstorming football, and blow oppositions away. That’s absolutely not the real world, the way that teams are setting up at the moment."
Both before he took over in 2000, and when O’Connor was in the final year of his first term in 2006, Kerry and Armagh played a pair of ding-ding Croke Park battles, with the score 1-1.
“In that quarter final in 2006, we played Armagh in one of the most enjoyable games I have ever been involved in. That time you could walk around the back of the goals, which I did, because our backs were under ferocious pressure. The way Armagh were playing, with Steven McDonnell and Ronan Clarke inside, and Oisin McConville playing off them was fantastic football to watch and very effective. But you try to do that now, and more often than not the backs are going to be coming out with it purely on the basis of numbers.
“We’d love to go back to that era, that was an absolutely epic game, one of the games (outside of All-Irelands) that stands out in my head. But football has changed dramatically in the meantime and we had to change with it.”
So the Derry affair is washed out of their hair at this stage? “Again, could we have been more energetic, and more adventurous, even with those constraints on the day? Of course, we could. But you can’t blame the players, who had got burned against that sort of system in the past, for having to feel their way into the game. In the second half we got the mix and the balance a bit better.
“It was a very structured game, and we were thinking on the sideline that it was going to take some fella coming in here and doing something different. That’s what Cillian Burke did, he hit straight lines and punched holes, the sort of stuff he’s very good at. He was exactly the right man at the right time to break that system and structure that Derry had. That gave our fellas the lead and confidence to drive on and go for it.”