A fresh voice is secret to success

All-Ireland SFC final: Jack O'Connor believes it's no coincidence that he has become the third successive manager to win an All-Ireland in his first year in charge. The Kerry manager was reflecting on his team's success shortly before their departure back home.

"I feel that your first year is always your best year, because you're a new voice and players haven't heard it before, so they might sit up and listen to you the first year.

"If it works, great, but it can get harder after that because they can get a bit tired of listening to the same thing. We might have to pull a few more stunts next year to try and motivate players, but that's for another day. A fresh voice definitely helps."

He said that the team had been very confident before the match and not at all affected by the catastrophic finales to the county's last three championships.

"We set out at the start of the year to wipe the slate clean and start afresh. Our last three visits to Croke Park this year were happy ones. We won the League final against Galway, beat Dublin, which is never easy there, and beat Derry, so we were drawing our inspiration from that rather than the failures of the past.

"If you'd met me privately in the last week, and it wasn't for quoting, I'd have told you that this display was going to come because we saw hints of it in the Dublin game and the Derry game. We certainly saw it in training and thought that everything was coming together for the lads - that they were peaking at the right time.

"We were very confident on Sunday morning, and if you were a fly on the wall at our team meeting you'd have got a lot of positive vibes. We were very confident that there was a great performance in the lads."

O'Connor had been a selector in Kerry's last two All-Ireland wins, in 2000 and 1997. He readily accepts the trade-off between additional workload and enhanced influence.

"It's more demanding being a manager, but it's more satisfying because you can put your own stamp on the team. There's a lot more responsibility with the media, but I enjoy that and I enjoy seeing the lads express themselves in the media, because that was one of the things we set out to do at the start of the year - to allow the lads express themselves both on and off the field and bring a sense of enjoyment to the whole thing, because it's supposed to be a pastime at the end of the day.

"Even the weekend up here, I told the lads to enjoy the whole build-up - the parade, meeting the President - because it was a great day in their lives and to enjoy it, not to fear it. We had all the work done."

O'Connor had the additional satisfaction of seeing his most controversial selection call - John Crowley instead of Michael Russell - work out tremendously well, as Kerry's high-ball attack drew a superb response from Crowley.

"We've 30 players on the panel knocking clunks out of each other every night. From week to week, month to month, players come into form and maybe more players lose a bit of form. It was just that we felt John Crowley had really come into form over the last month. John has been on and off the team for the past two years and we felt this was the last hurrah for him. He deserved his go at it. We felt that his strength was his strength, if you know what I'm saying. We felt he'd give us another option of putting in long ball early on, which we felt we needed to do.

"It was a tight call against Michael Frank Russell and initially he took it badly and was very disappointed. But he rallied around as the week wore on and came on, on Sunday and kicked a massive point."

Yesterday morning, having awoken early, O'Connor had the opportunity to let the treble victory - League, Munster and All-Ireland - sink in before the bustle of the day was properly under way.

"I just went for a walk there with Johnny Culloty (selector) and we sat down on a bench over there in the park and there's a great, warm inner glow, a feeling of satisfaction. It's not euphoria, because that's for the fans, but just satisfaction at having accomplished our goal."