The Kerry mentality is something special alright.
If you could take one breed of people on this island to lead the country to world domination, you wouldn’t go far wrong with the mindset of a Kerry footballer.
It’s just a different temperament altogether. It’s one that never settles. One that doesn’t do second best. One that just can’t do first place enough.
The Kerry footballer is a different breed. You know what, it’s almost a different species.
Whatever hunger they’re supposed to muster in a game that most of them have been born and bred into, one they’ve devoted their whole lives to, it comes from an unfathomable tradition. A tradition of winning. A tradition of no relent, one that doesn’t liken a great career to reaching the top of the mountain just once.
Darran O’Sullivan has reached the height of that climb four times already. He’s gazed at the summit from the final incline on three different occasions and, still, he wants to get back up. He has to.
In Kerry, you get no kudos for coming back down the road with one All-Ireland medal in your pocket. Heck, sometimes you don’t even get so much as a pat on the back for coming back with four.
“It’s great to have the medals but you’re always trying to catch up to someone. There’s always someone with more in Kerry.”
That’s how a 28-year-old, four-time All-Ireland winner sees it. What other county could boast a player that says he’s almost unfulfilled with four Sam Maguire titles? What other county could say that it’s not enough? You need the next one.
“It’s always great to have that pressure that you’re trying to keep up with someone or catch someone and that’s good,” Darran O’Sullivan spoke with SportsJOE during the week. “Most of the boys won their first last year so I think everyone in the panel now will have a medal but there’s no point having a medal. You always need to keep going and getting better.
“You know the other counties, the rival counties, are going to be improving over the winter – we had to improve, too – so you just have to keep doing it. You can’t rest on your laurels.”
The prospect of The Kingdom in 2015 is frightening. Not only did they leave September behind them with a 37th All-Ireland for their troubles, but they’ve since welcomed back Tommy Walsh from Australia and they have the small matter of sliding the fit-again likes of Colm Cooper and Darran O’Sullivan back into that same forward line somewhere.
That’s almost what hindered the half forward’s full comeback last year. The Kerry panel isn’t exactly the sort you can afford to coast in and, time and time again, O’Sullivan would push it too far in an effort to stake his own claim in a savagely competitive environment. It was all or nothing for him.
“It’s a good thing and a bad thing,” the Glenbeigh-Glencar club man weighed up the competition in the squad. “If you’re unfit and trying to come back from injury, it’s a bad thing. You’re constantly chasing fellas and you’re seeing fellas going well and you’re doubting yourself or whatever. But that’s the thing, you need competition and you need fellas who are going to drive you and we’ve got that in Kerry at the moment.
“I’d be going well for a week or two and then just push the body that little bit too far instead of just saying to myself, ‘do you know what, take the night off here, relax and you’ll be fine for Thursday or whatever.’ Sometimes that just comes down to a bit of cop on really. I was a bit naïve, I was mad for the ball and I had missed stuff so I didn’t want to miss anymore. So I literally kept pushing the body to the limit and it just kept breaking down and stupidly I just kept doing the same over and over again.
“I’ve hopefully learned my lesson now. I played until late November with the club which probably wasn’t the best idea but I got a bit of football under my belt and I’m taking my break now, doing my rehab and concentrating on bits and pieces to make sure I’m fully back properly.”
In yet another example of the need to revisit the current fixtures format, O’Sullivan’s case tops the agenda. Playing year round, ploughing on with an injury, he gets little chance to mend and recover. And he’s no sooner back out playing club football in his county, contesting two championships with both Glenbeigh-Glencar and Mid Kerry.
“You could be training in December, January, whatever it is and you could be training hopefully up to September with Kerry and then you’re out with your club and that goes until late December and then you’re back again and it’s just a bit much at the moment. With my story last year as well, my body was just giving way because for so many years you’re doing that and you’re not getting much of a break. You need a set season, it’s as simple as that,” he said.
“There’s definitely a way around it. What it is, I don’t know. Whether they’ll do it, I don’t know either but they have to sort something. They’re getting paid enough, a few of them.”
O’Sullivan is finally being forced to sit out. He’s missing the start of the league campaign with Kerry and he doesn’t like it because he knows he’ll be back slogging it out between games that are few and far between. The 2009-winning captain thinks a fixed season would solve a lot of the problems and that no-one who’s anyone would mind rattling out games week in, week out.
“That’s what fellas want, they want games,” he said. “I do anyway because when you’re playing games every week it means you’re training less! But it’s great, I’m looking forward to it and it’s great to have it back so soon. It’s a pity though that there’s such a break between league and championship. It would be great if you could have something a bit more constant throughout the year. The breaks are a bit of a disaster. There’s nothing worse than waiting four or five, sometimes 10 or 11 weeks for a game.”
The whippet attacker looks back at last season as almost a milestone. Kerry had to reinvent themselves, they did, and it paid dividends. Eamonn Fitzmaurice’s reputation hit the roof throughout the 2014 campaign and O’Sullivan thinks his manager deserves every credit.
“Eamonn’s brilliant,” he said. “He’s not long out of the game so he understands it. He still looks at it from a player’s point of view but he can look at it from a manager’s point of view too and make the decision himself. To be fair, the squad at the moment is very close and I know you’d hear most counties saying, ‘oh, we’re very close,’ but I would find it very hard to find a closer knit Kerry team that I have been a part of. A lot of the boys have come through together and they haven’t all won stuff at underage but they’ve just come through tough times where they haven’t been successful so, I suppose, when they were successful last year, it made it that bit sweeter.
“They’ve had some tough times and some tough defeats together and now they’ve had some great wins so I think that’s helped. And there’s a good energy about the place.
“Last year we were very fortunate, we were always under the radar and we didn’t get much pressure put on us, which is a great thing. Obviously this year it’s going to be different because there wasn’t much attention on us last season and that’s going to be a new challenge for fellas.
“But, at the same time, a lot of our boys have been here before.”
You bet your backside they have. If anyone knows what it feels like to have red dots aiming at their heads, Kerry do.
If anything, they’ll feel more comfortable defending their title tasked with the challenge of backing it up. Because that’s what they do. That’s what they always have to do.
After all, there’s always someone with more in Kerry.
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