Only in Kerry. Éamonn Fitzmaurice goes into this All-Ireland semi-final against Dublin knowing that he kind of has to win or else he kind of has to go. The grumbles are still confined to rumbles but if the lens jockeys are semi-circling Jim Gavin instead of the Kerry manager shortly after 5pm tomorrow, we can cock an ear and expect them to be given full cry by nightfall.

Time for a new voice. Taken them as far as he can. Thank you and good night.

Proving once again that Páidí Ó Sé wasn’t overdoing it about Kerry supporters, there is a pronounced strain of doubt within the county over Fitzmaurice. It is under the radar and off the record for the moment, but nobody denies it exists.

While it was always thought probable that this would be his final year in the job regardless, the least he might have earned by now was to call his own way out. Let’s see.

“The doubt is stemming from last year’s All-Ireland final,” says Dara Ó Cinnéide.

“Fitzmaurice would be the first to say he didn’t have his best day. He spreads the credit when they win All-Irelands and they’re very much a unit on the line. He was very uneasy when all the praise was going his way after 2014 and he’s held his hands up when it’s gone against them.

“He’s got a very keen brain. He takes criticism on himself when he gets it wrong – after last year’s drawn Munster final he came out and said he got it wrong on the line. He’d admit that the All-Ireland final last year wasn’t his finest hour either. But I think he should be allowed a bad day.”

Ó Cinnéide prefaces everything with a declaration that he’s “blinded by loyalty” here. He and Fitzmaurice lived together in college, won All-Irelands together, won’t be losing each other’s phone number anytime soon. All the same, he’s a journalist by trade and is objective by instinct.

Poor performance

“It was a really poor performance in the All-Ireland final last year. Just a really bad day in terms of what they wanted to do and their execution of it. I think the league final this year gave us a false sense of hope going in and a big overreaction coming out. They wanted to win the league, definitely.

“They had their best campaign in yonks. They got to the final. They’d have liked to win it, of course. But it was still their best league campaign under Fitzmaurice. They played some great football to get there, reinvented some players, pushed some new ones along. But as soon as they lost the final, people were giving out.

“Since when has losing a league final been important to people in Kerry? When has that ever mattered?”

Never, particularly. This is different though, because of who they lost to and how. Losing to Dublin matters more now than in Ó Cinnéide’s day, for reasons well-aired throughout the past week. Kerry enjoyed a rivalry with Dublin when they were winning. Now they’re enduring one.

They’ve met seven times in league and championship since Fitzmaurice took over in late 2012. Dublin have much the better of the head-to-head - 5-2 overall, 2-0 in championship. Those two defeats are the only championship games Fitzmaurice has lost as Kerry manager – so far his summer has always ended either losing to Dublin or winning the All-Ireland. They are the shadow on any X-ray of his time in charge.

Serial defeats to Dublin amplify everything. In a world where they were winning these games, Fitzmaurice’s preference for players of experience would be seen as canny management of his resources.

Instead, there has been hand-wringing throughout his time in charge – even in the All-Ireland year of 2014 – at his reluctance to put his trust in youth.

New faces

Looked at one way, the charge is accurate. Fitzmaurice came to the job straight from the under-21 sideline and when he went looking for new faces, he fished extensively in waters he already knew well. In four seasons, he has given championship debuts to 12 players – six of them from his own 2012 under-21 team.

Up until this summer, he hadn't once fielded a player in a championship game who was eligible for that year's under-21 competition. That streak ended with Brian Ó Beaglaoich in the Munster championship in June and since then Tony Brosnan came on as a late sub in the quarter-final against Clare.

Going with what he knew fed into a sense that Fitzmaurice was unwilling to throw the dice on the generation coming up behind. But that’s an argument in the eye of the beholder. Maybe Fitzmaurice is an arch-conservative, set in his ways and unbending in his preferences. Or maybe the players just weren’t there.

Ó Cinnéide knows which door he’d pick.

“The test for any manager is this – is he getting the best out of the group of players he has available? Well that’s an absolute tick of the box when it comes to Kerry at the moment. For what’s been available to Fitzmaurice over the past four years, he is absolutely getting the maximum out of them.

“The dynamic has changed now, four years later. We’ve had a couple of All-Ireland minor winning teams that will hopefully provide players over the coming years. But go back and look at what it was like at the end of 2012.

“Jack O’Connor had, by his own admission, taken the group as far as he could. There was a view that there was going to be a heap of retirements and they have certainly lost their share of players over the past four years.

“In 2013, they surprised us all with the football they played against Dublin. Okay, it was a hammering by the scoreline in the end but we all know that game was very close. That was a team that had been beaten in the quarter-final by Donegal the previous year. He came in at a low ebb. Nobody wanted the job. People forget that.

"Kerry will consistently be there, that's the hope anyway. And with the underage talent coming through, the future is probably bright. But nobody was saying that four years ago. This has been a period of transition. We all had a good laugh with Joe Brolly in 2014 for saying we were in transition but he was right. The transition was managed so well, Fitzmaurice managed to squeeze an All-Ireland out of it."

Drew flak

If the Brazilian football team has 200 million bosses, the last census put Kerry’s manager count at around 140,000. Fitzmaurice drew flak from some of them early on for appointing Cian O’Neill – a Kildareman – as team trainer. Losing an early league game to Dublin in Killarney by 1-11 to 0-4 didn’t help matters either.

And then there’s the closed-door training sessions. What might be considered a red herring in other counties has a heightened status in Kerry. What was gained on the swings of being able to do their work in private has been lost on the roundabouts where public leeway was always afforded.

The Kerry team has become closed off from its people which is fine – as long as you win.

“He’s never going to be popular because he closed the gates in Killarney,” says Ó Cinnéide. “That’s always been looming there in the background. He doesn’t court public opinion, he doesn’t court media. He doesn’t try to make himself out to be a genius; there’s absolutely no ego there.

“He’s just a very down to earth, solid guy who has guided Kerry through what could have been a very rough period. It would be a huge shame if Kerry supporters were to be hard on him.

“It’s part of the culture in Kerry that we kind of know that we’re hard on each other when it comes to football and hardest of all on the Kerry manager. But the sense of entitlement that builds up then is wrong. What entitles us? I just don’t get that. It’s bullshit. You’ve to start every year from scratch. Tradition won’t win you a semi-final or a final.

Richer tradition

“There’s this notion that Kerry are entitled to win All-Irelands. But the truth is we’re the same as any other county, just probably with a richer tradition. The way the game is at the moment, Mayo have every bit as much right to expect an All-Ireland on January 1st as Kerry do. So do Dublin, so do a handful of other teams.”

Like plenty of his countymen, Ó Cinnéide started the week pretty much resigned to a Dublin win tomorrow. As the days passed, general Kerryness took over and he heads to Croke Park far from down-hearted. These were supposed to be barren years for Kerry and yet here they are, with Fitzmaurice on the brink of a third All-Ireland final in a row. Underdogs, yes. But Ó Cinnéide is okay with that.

“I just think there’s a group of players there who are getting to an age where they must be thinking, ‘Is that it? Is it just going to be one All-Ireland for me? Is that my lot?’ That’s huge motivation.

“You’d be nearly hiding your face walking down the street in Kerry in 10 years if that was the case. I know that, having three of them. I always preface it with saying, ‘Ah, I’ve only three.’

“And you get people saying, ‘Is that all? Jeez, I thought you’d more, now.’ I’m 41 now and that’s the nature of the conversation you get in Kerry. These guys are 25 to 28 and if they’re happy enough to live with one All-Ireland, then Dublin will win handy.

"But I think there's huge motivation in them now. I would never, ever underestimate Eamonn Fitzmaurice or a Kerry team in Croke Park."