In the Kerry court of opinion every judge is a hanging judge and in the summer of 2009, Jack O’Connor was a condemned man. In these cases, there is no right to appeal, though the court may change its mind, like the woman in the Billy Joel song.
At the time, the team was in a tailspin. Cork had beaten them by eight points, which, in old money, was a thrashing. Losing to Cork carried extra levies and taxes. Everyone suffers. The manager pays.
“We look like a team with no game plan, no idea of who or what we want to be,” wrote Colm Cooper in his autobiography. “Worse, there’s not a shred of hunger in what we’re doing. People are telling us we have no heart.”
It was the first year of O’Connor’s second stint as manager. In the interlude he had written his autobiography, which had included notes from private conversations and fly-on-the-wall scenes from the team’s inner sanctum. Some people who couldn’t put the book down complained that he had been indiscreet. Some of the players felt there had been a breach of trust. Some of them would later write books.
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In the first part of the season, the manager’s memoirs had lingered in the air, like a chill. By the summer, it was overtaken by wildfires. “We were going through turmoil,” says Darran O’Sullivan, who was the Kerry captain that year.
Defeat by Cork railroaded them into a qualifier run against Longford, Sligo and Antrim, as it turned out. Two teams who had been promoted from Division Four in the spring, and one who had been relegated from Division Three.
O’Sullivan was dropped for the Longford game but came on. Kerry won by four points. The coverage was peppered with “limped” and “unconvincing” and other expressions of tut-tutting. O’Connor was frazzled.
“I didn’t play great, none of us did,” says O’Sullivan. “Then I got a call from Jack giving out that I didn’t work hard enough. He gave me a right earful on the phone. And I was saying to myself, ‘That’s not right.’ He ended up ringing me back the following day. ‘I’ve rewatched it,’ he said. ‘You actually had more tackles than anyone.’”
Worse was to follow. Sligo came to Tralee the following week because Fitzgerald Stadium in Killarney was occupied by the Pussycat Dolls. In their master fixtures plan the county board assumed they would have a commercial opening on a qualifier weekend.
With only a couple of minutes left in a one-score game, Diarmuid Murphy saved a penalty from Dave Kelly. Kerry drove away from the crash with their wing mirror hanging off and their bumper scraping the road. Won by a point. “I’m sitting there in the dressingroom afterwards and I can’t believe how bad things feel,” wrote Cooper.
That evening he was gripped by cabin fever, so he went by himself to Jade’s bar in Killarney and had a few pints watching golf on television, not caring who saw him. Elsewhere that evening, Tomás Ó Sé flouted the drinking ban too. Both of them were smoked out.
The circus went on for days. In midweek there was a players’ meeting, without the management, designed for bloodletting and contrition. Cooper and Ó Sé apologised and were dropped for the next game. The story broke on Friday’s Irish Examiner. “Kerry All Stars dropped,” ran the front-page splash.
Kerry played well for about 15 minutes against Antrim and survived. On the train home, the draw for the All-Ireland quarter-finals were made; Dublin saved Kerry from themselves.
“When we got Dublin in Croke Park, it was like someone turned the lights on,” says O’Sullivan. “It was that simple. You just needed a game to get the blood flowing.”
Dublin were favourites; Kerry beat them by 17 points. “I wrote in the Examiner that I thought Dublin would win,” says Dara Ó Cinnéide, the broadcaster and former Kerry captain. “Afterwards Eamon Fitzmaurice texted me – he was a selector with Jack at the time. ‘You f**ker, you had no faith in us.’ We’re great friends. He said it in the right spirit.”
In 2009, the crisis in Kerry’s summer lasted from the middle of June to the August Bank Holiday Weekend. In the first minute of the quarter final Cooper scored a goal into the Hill 16 End and, in hindsight, that was the moment the trouble ended.
Everything is telescoped by the split season now, but the explosion of discord and keening this summer lasted about a fortnight. Kerry lost badly to Meath, won badly against Cavan, were speared by the commentariat at home and abroad and were dismissed against Armagh. After that spin cycle, Kerry’s linen was clean again. Or a grey white, from repeated hot washes.
In his third stint in the job, O’Connor had experienced this kind of stuff before. He couldn’t have endured this long without having the wherewithal to cope.
“One thing about Jack was that, while he’d let on that he’s thick-skinned enough,” wrote Tomás Ó Sé in his autobiography, “I think sometimes things got to him.” That must be true and there must have been times when he bent under the strain of continuous assessment and fantastical standards.
He was first appointed in October 2003, on the week his mother died. “Johneen a chroí, don’t take that job at all, they’ll only be giving out to you,” were his mother’s last words to him. He knew she was right.
“Look, Jack is at his best when he’s being questioned,” says Fitzmaurice, who played under him and worked alongside him. “He’s a ferocious competitor. When I was on the other side of the table – as senior manager and he was under-21 manager – and he was looking for players, he wouldn’t have been looking at the big picture with the senior team.
“But when the shoe was on the other foot – when he was the senior manager – if anyone came looking for anyone they were strictly off-limits. He has that. He’s just a complete competitor. I think that’s central to his personality.”
In the 2006 season, during his first stint in the job, there was another episode of turbulence that threatened to blow Kerry off course. Just like in 2009, it started with a wounding defeat to Cork, this time in a replay.
That was the day when the Kerry captain Declan O’Sullivan was taken off. It is often recalled that he was booed by a rump of Kerry followers as he was leaving the field, but, in a sense, it was crueller than that: they cheered the fact that he was coming off.
“The treatment Declan got was unheard of,” says O’Sullivan. “It was probably the worst experience I ever had in terms of looking at the crowd going, ‘What the f**k are ye at.’ You’ll take all the abuse in the world, but that was just wrong.”
An hour after the match, O’Connor convened a crisis meeting in Hayfield Manor, a plush hotel near UCC on Cork’s southside. “At the meeting, people say their pieces but nothing’s really resolved,” writes Cooper. “‘The knockers will be out in force now,’ Jack tells us.”
O’Sullivan is O’Connor’s clubmate and friend and for two weeks he agonised about dropping him and, in the end, he did. In the meantime, there was hardly enough bandwidth for the kaleidoscope of salacious stories.
“There is such a poisonous atmosphere around the place,” writes O’Connor in his autobiography. “The poison gets magnified and turned around on us in the papers. Stories that the Ó Sé’s have been attempting to pick the team. Walk-outs. Bust-ups. Attempted coups. You could go into every story and knock it on the head but why dignify bullshit like that. There’s kicks in the cojones on every page I look at.
“Different things keep me going. Bloody mindedness. Determination. This feeling of closeness with the team.”
For the next match against Longford, they relocated Kieran Donaghy to full-forward as a target man with jazz hands. For Kerry that summer, the oldest gambit in Gaelic football was both reductive and visionary.
“We saw it in the book especially how much that summer annoyed Jack,” says Fitzmaurice, who was still a player back then. “It was a new journey for him because he had never been through the qualifiers before. Donaghy’s personality energised the whole group [that summer].”
Over the last month, Kerry’s issues were injuries and form. In their spectacular recovery against Armagh there was no tactical masterstroke, but there was a manifest difference. The energy and the clarity came from somewhere. O’Connor had plumbed that well before.
“Jack is exceptionally good in these situations with his back to the well,” says Ó Cinnéide. “He doesn’t get to use that chip often. Kerry are always favourites and usually come out with a good result. But he’s really, really good with his back to the wall. His instincts are really strong. You know, ‘Who’ll do well for me this week? Who’ll do right for me here?’ He’d have watched training the following week and he’d almost have known by a fella’s body language who’s genuinely up for it. He has great sensibilities around people like that.
“I had a conversation with somebody from the inner circle of Kerry football after the Meath game and I said, ‘They need to be exposed to this. They need to hurt.’ And Jack needed to do what he did as well [criticising pundits from Kerry and elsewhere in his quarter final press conference]. He needed to get that off his chest. But what’s our next trick now? We’ve done the anger part. You can’t depend on raw anger every time. You need something more sustainable.”
It is a staggering 33 years since O’Connor first appeared as a selector with the Kerry under-21s. He is 64 now. In all that time, his capacity to absorb radiation has been extraordinary.
“I’m not bragging, I’m just giving you facts,” O’Connor said in a 2021 podcast. “In my first four years coaching Kerry – ’04, ’05, ’06, ’09 – I won three leagues, three Munster championships and three All-Irelands. I got the height of abuse. That’s a fact.”
“He’s not part of any clique [in Kerry football],” says Ó Cinnéide. “He’s not part of any circle. Every time he loses a game the knives are sharpened. I did feel for him coming into the Armagh game. I thought he was a bit isolated. I thought he should have enough money in bank [with all his success].”
In 2006 and 2009, there were no crash landings. Kerry’s season ended on the steps of the Hogan, regardless of the upheavals. After the Armagh game, a fortnight ago, the cuts suddenly healed. Nothing unites Kerry like winning.
For a Kerry manager, it is the only way to break even.
