In the first season of his breakthrough stint as Kerry manager, nearly 20 years ago, Jack O’Connor took the squad to a warm weather training camp in Spain.
For their first session the players assembled on the running track, expecting to be put through the wringer by Pat Flanagan, the new Kerry trainer. Instead, they had dropped into his clinic. He examined their biomechanics, searching for habits in need of a cure: the alignment of knees, hips and arms; all the parts that moved them.
Flanagan was a lecturer in sports science and a champion sprinter in his day, and it wasn’t just that he was new, or not from Kerry, or not a football coach, but the very idea of somebody like him was alien to the Kerry players, and their native, uncontested, understanding of winning football matches.
“He was a bit exotic, I suppose, for us,” says Dara Ó Cinnéide, Kerry’s All-Ireland-winning captain that season.
At the end of the session one of the alpha wolves in the pack approached a Kerry selector, howling in protest at this lunatic carry-on. The complaint was noted, and ignored.
“There was a lot of experience in that dressingroom – older lads,” says Tomás Ó Sé. “This was the first time that we had somebody who was qualified, who was a lecturer, who was actually trained to do this stuff, and it was met with, I suppose, suspicion is the right word. He used to break it down so slowly for us, we were doing it in slow motion, and we were looking at each other, ‘What the f**k has this got to do with football?’
“Fellas were cagey at the start, and it took a while, but what he did say to us – and it stuck in a lot of fellas’ heads – he said, ‘I’ll have ye absolutely lifting for Croke Park’. He was true to his word.”
O’Connor had come into office without an overwhelming majority, so forming a coalition with somebody like Flanagan, a Waterford man, involved an element of risk. In Kerry, there was no tradition of importing expertise. In football terms, they were uniquely self-sufficient. Who knew something they didn’t?
“The attitude in Kerry would have been that there’s enough fellas around the place who could look after teams,” says Ger O’Keeffe, the former Kerry player, who served as a selector with O’Connor during his first two terms as manager.
O’Connor, though, had an open mind. He was curious. In the Kerry job he saw himself as an outsider, which might have liberated his thinking too. Long before GPS systems had entered the day-to-day vernacular of high performance sport, O’Connor engaged with a company from Galway who were offering the service.
He went looking for a dietitian and alighted upon Aoife Hearne from Waterford, well known now for her role on RTÉ’s Operation Transformation. At the time, all of this required a shift in thinking. He was tearing down borders in players’ minds.
“I remember we were having dinner in The Great Southern, and a couple of the lads were throwing buns at Aoife,” says O’Keeffe. “Buns for the soup. That was the attitude at that stage.”
In his third stint as manager, O’Connor had no reason to shorten his horizon. When Kerry won the All-Ireland last year, four key members of his back room team were from other counties; all of whom are still on board. Paddy Tally, from Tyrone, is the coach; Tony Griffin, the former Clare hurler, is the performance coach.
The other pair hail from the small Armagh village of Tullysaran: Jason McGahan is head of athletic performance for Kerry GAA, and heavily involved with the senior footballers; on his recommendation Kerry reached out to Colin Trainor, a brilliant mind in the ever-spinning world of data analytics.
McGahan’s connection has some roots. When Eamon Fitzmaurice was manager, Cian O’Neill was the Kerry trainer and McGahan was a PhD student under O’Neill’s wing in CIT.
For some practical experience, O’Neill involved McGahan in the Kerry set-up in 2015, and when O’Neill took the manager’s job in his native Kildare for the following season, McGahan followed him. When that finished, Kerry snapped him up.
Trainor arrived by a much different route. For years his hobby was soccer analysis. In the beginning it informed his betting and gave it an edge, but as time went on Trainor plunged into the jungle of hidden patterns and undetected causes, the under-our-noses stuff that shaped the outcome of matches.
Trainor shared his thoughts on social media, and posted detailed blogs, and became a hugely respected voice in the analysis community. In December 2014 he wrote a long piece on Borussia Dortmund that reached such an audience, and caused so many ripples, that it influenced Liverpool’s thinking on Jurgen Klopp, their future manager.
Dortmund had won the Bundesliga a couple of years earlier, and had reached the final of the 2013 Champions League, but they were second from bottom in the table at the mid-winter break of the 2014/15 season. Trainor’s analysis, though, stripped away their league position and drilled into data and trends that had gone unnoticed.
In staggering detail, and with a searing eye for what mattered, Trainor was able to show that the key metrics in Dortmund’s performances bore no relation to their league position. Liverpool’s head of research, Ian Graham, was one of the people who read the piece and it prompted Liverpool to do their own analysis; they reached the same conclusion as Trainor.
In this sphere, Trainor was an innovator. He devised a metric for capturing the effectiveness of a team’s press, a tactic beloved of Klopp at the time, and many other coaches since; the concept was called Passes Per Defensive Action (PPDA). The approach gained such currency that Marseilles in Ligue 1 contacted Opta, mistaking it for one of their bespoke services; it was Trainor’s creation.
While still holding down a full-time job as a financial controller he spent a year working for a Premier League club, but after that season he drifted away from soccer and back towards Gaelic football, the game he had played in his childhood.
He could turn his mind to anything. McGahan recommended Trainor to Peter Keane, O’Connor’s predecessor in the Kerry job; when his turn came, O’Connor asked Trainor to stay.
Griffin and Tally, though, were O’Connor’s appointments. Griffin had cut his teeth as a performance coach with Anthony Daly and the Dublin hurlers, more than a decade ago, and when O’Connor took over in Kildare he persuaded Griffin to resume that trail with him.
The start of his relationship with Tally is harder to trace. In Keys to the Kingdom, O’Connor’s 2007 autobiography, he refers to a meeting in Dublin with “a very prominent northern football man who knows exactly what they do. (He has to remain nameless.) We sit for a few hours, he shows me drills, opens up a new world of work to me.”
That was the winter after Tyrone had beaten Kerry in the 2005 All-Ireland final, when O’Connor was consumed by Ulster football, and the long shadow it had thrown on Kerry.
“I plunder the Ulster GAA council website,” he writes, “which is full of essays and drills on tackling. I go to speak to people about tackling. I phone contacts in Ulster. What are Armagh doing? What do Tyrone do? This is almost a betrayal of my Kerry blood, to be asking how they do things up north.”
Could the person he met have been Tally?
“They’ve known each other for years, I’d say,” says Ó Cinnéide. “I remember thinking, reading that sentence, ‘I suppose that’s Tally’. In fairness to Jack, he was never slow to look outside. Appointing Tally was a huge thing. If you were talking to old-timers in pubs, it was a huge thing. I didn’t know Tally myself, but I was saying to fellas, ‘Jack doesn’t do foolish things. He’s obviously going to get something out of him.’”
Kerry people have always seen themselves as curators of Gaelic football’s most beautiful parts. The cynicism they practised through the generations never overwhelmed their reputation or their self-image; it was absorbed, somehow. Winning was sometimes a dirty business; they understood that better than anyone.
The kind of cynicism that Tyrone have cultivated, though, since the turn of the century had an unpalatable quality; it was coarse, blatant, unapologetic. When O’Connor appointed Tally, Kerry people were a little concerned about what he would bring. They’re not squeamish about what it takes to win, but they worry about appearances.
“You had rumblings from the public,” says Ó Sé, “but you’ll always have that. They would have thought because Tally was coming down, Kerry would suddenly go defensive. It was only silly talk. Jack O’Connor is clever enough to realise that he has some of the best forwards in the country and he wasn’t going to go playing a certain type of game.
“Kerry are good enough that they don’t have to play ultra-defensive. When Tally came in, they stopped leaking goals. That was the importance of him. I think Kerry people are very simple on this. They don’t care what’s going on in the background as long as the team is going well.”
In Keys to the Kingdom, a recurring thread is how bothered O’Connor was by heckling from outside the camp, but you wonder if any of that would trouble him now?
“The Jack model of recent years doesn’t care what people think,” says Ó Cinnéide. “Twenty years ago would have been different, when he was bringing in Flanagan. He had been with him with the U-21s when they lost to Waterford. Pat Spillane was very vocal at the time asking why were they giving him the job? They’d lost to Waterford. But the 60-something Jack doesn’t give a flying fiddlers what people think.”
Tullysaran is so close to the border with Tyrone that the GAA grounds have a Dungannon postcode. In places like that, feelings between neighbours are magnified. The first All-Ireland that McGahan was brought to as a child was the 1986 final between Kerry and Tyrone; he stood on the Canal End terrace wearing a Kerry head band.
Today, there is no distance between Tullysaran and Tralee. Common ground.
