RTÉ’S Sunday Game analyst Martin Carney has reiterated his view that Kerry are in a natural process of decline. During his commentary on the Munster semi-final between Cork and Kerry on Sunday, Carney observed towards the end: “It’s one of those days when the music died for an awful lot of the Kerry players.”

In the immediate aftermath Kerry manager Jack O’Connor took issue with the view that the team was past it, saying: “We think there’s a fair bit left in this squad.”

Speaking to this newspaper Carney explained his comments. “I have great regard for the Kerry team. Their record speaks for itself: five All-Irelands in 12 years is second only to the great team in the 1970s and ’80s when the environment wasn’t as competitive. I’ve watched them quite a bit over that time and they owe nothing to the game. I just felt that their play in the closing minutes hadn’t the desire that we would have seen over the last couple of years.

“They set standards for everyone, including themselves, in their skills and how they competed and I just thought yesterday with about 10 minutes to go there seemed to be a collective lethargy, an unwillingness maybe to drive themselves on that bit harder, as they would have done in the past.

“I put it down to the fact these guys have given so much to football and played so much, maybe it’s not in them any more to want to go that little bit further. When you look at them as a group, some have been in eight or nine All-Ireland finals in the last 10 years. It’s bound to take a toll on you mentally apart from physically, you’re never away from the coalface.

“I felt in a game against Cork, their traditional rivals, the fight wasn’t in them at a certain time of the match. They could always in the past pick out those scores at defining moments of the game and they were often the difference between winning and losing. With 10 minutes to go there were just two points in it. If you factor in they’d had four goal chances and missed two 45s that Bryan Sheehan might have got. I sensed I was looking at an absence of the drive and energy that might have got them over the line previously.”

Kerry have an unusual record against Cork in the Munster championship having done as well in All-Irelands after losing to their provincial rivals as when they win the title. The county’s most recent All-Ireland falls into the former category, something that has made the football world wary of writing off O’Connor’s team. Carney accepts the potential of Kerry coming alive in the qualifiers but emphasises the circumstances this year are different to three seasons ago when Kerry struggled through to the All-Ireland quarter-finals at which stage the annihilation of Dublin fuelled a successful campaign.

“Their last All-Ireland was in 2009 and gone from that team is their goalkeeper Diarmuid Murphy, Tommy Griffin, now Tom O’Sullivan, Tadhg Kennelly and Tommy Walsh. Darragh Ó Sé was for me the one who would stand one of those guys up against the wall in the dressingroom and tell them what they needed to do, in other words the leadership figure in the team, who could get a response and drive them on. That sort of personality is a big loss.

“The number of withdrawals they’ve had over the past three years, the loss of Darragh Ó Sé’s influence, leadership and plus, that they have played so much football at this stage: combined, these factors have taken them below the level at which they placed themselves a couple of years ago.”

For all of the stardust in attack – three of the starting forwards are former footballers of the year and two others have been shortlisted – Kerry laboured for scores. Carney believes opponents are well prepared at this stage. “People have done so much homework on Colm Cooper and so much analysis of his game and style, he’s quite familiar and management teams are far more practised at identifying the strengths of opponents. Apart from that, he’s played in eight All-Ireland finals, won four and also been on a Dr Crokes team that’s reached an All-Ireland final and replay and a semi-final. He’s bound to be feeling the effects.

“There comes a stage in every team’s evolution and life cycle when performance levels drop. It’s natural and I just think that that time might be arriving for Kerry.”