Handling pressure is a prerequisite to being Kerry football captain. When you lead out the team that's won 69 Munster titles and 33 All-Irelands, it comes with the job. But there's definitely no escaping it when you're only 21, billed as the county's latest football prodigy, and the first Dromid Pearse's player ever to be made Kerry captain.

Yet, in the week before the biggest game of his career to date, Declan O'Sullivan is handling pressure like it doesn't exist. It doesn't even matter that he was one of the Kerry forwards that failed to score against Limerick in the semi-final. O'Sullivan is embracing Sunday's Munster football final against Cork from every angle, even his role as captain.

"The way things have gone for me this year, I haven't had the chance to dwell on the captaincy at all," he says. "I've been busy trying to keep my head down and train hard. The start of the year was a very frustrating period because of injury, and I spent a number of months trying to catch up.

"So I just see Sunday as a great opportunity now to put that hard work to the test in a Munster final. I'm happy to do my duties as captain, but other than that I just look after my own patch. I wouldn't be a great man for the roaring anyway. We've plenty of leaders on the field, and that's the way it has to be."

O'Sullivan missed all of Kerry's league campaign with a knee injurythat came on at the end of his successful club run with South Kerry last autumn.

He had a minor operation in the middle of February, and for a few weeks his whole season was still hanging in the balance. His hunger and drive to get back was relentless. It helped that Kerry manager Jack O'Connor has become a father-like figure in his career, grooming O'Sullivan for success from his days at Coláiste na Sceilge.

"I was so anxious to get back that I just tore into it for the first couple of weeks, and that might have been a bit of a mistake. You do have to pace yourself, and take things gradually.

"Maybe it took a little bit longer than I expected and that was a little bit frustrating. But in the end I was better off taking my time, and hopefully I'll feel the benefits of that now.

"It wasn't too much of a worry, though, missing the league, because I did have a long season last year playing with the divisional team. Hopefully, I can stay injury free for the rest of the year. But, in a way, the injury threw any problem with hunger straight out the window. Being so frustrated on the sidelines gives you a great hunger to get back."

Yet, like most of his fellow forwards, O'Sullivan found their semi-final clash with Limerick a sobering experience. Kerry were unable to score between a goal after 30 seconds and a free over half an hour later, and in the end the 2-5 scored by Colm Gooch Cooper proved invaluable.

O'Sullivan has been playing at full forward, as opposed to his more familiar position at centre forward, and greater scoring spread against Cork has become paramount.

"Obviously, there's a lot of emphasis on Gooch at the moment after the performances he's been putting in. There were a few weeks there when my fitness wasn't where it should have been. But I feel like I've trained very hard over the last month, and I'll definitely be looking to put in my share of the workload on Sunday. Obviously. that means I'll be hoping to get a couple of scores.

"You just can't go into a game expecting to get scores. You just have to work hard, and go with the flow of the game, and if you do that then the opportunities will come. It's just up to the player then to take them. But we know we need to have certain players in certain positions doing certain jobs. The balance wasn't quite right against Limerick, but, hopefully, we can rectify that against Cork.

"If someone had said we'd beat Limerick by six points we'd have been delighted, but I suppose the big talking point afterwards was the performance, and not so much the result. So it was a wake-up call and told us that a lot more work has to be done.

"We know now that things won't happen automatically. We've all been trying to do that for the last number of weeks, and really put the head down. And I think we've been taking some encouragement from that, and that we can put in a better performance against Cork."

O'Sullivan is no stranger either to the pressure of playing Cork: "When I was growing up in Kerry that was always the big game in Munster football. Cork were the main rivals year in and year out. And I would have met Cork teams all the way up from minor and colleges and under-21.

"And I think they're still the main rivals for Kerry, because they always bring out the best in us. No Kerry team likes to lose, and especially against Cork up in Páirc Uí Chaoimh.

"So we can't afford to contemplate any other game than this, the back door or anything like that. We've been focusing all our attention on Cork, to get the result we want."