Kerry midfielder Diarmuid O’Connor admits there is a sense of entering the unknown on the opening weekend of this year’s National Football League.
The 2025 intercounty season throws in on Saturday with the GAA fraternity braced for the potentially seismic impact of the new Football Review Committee rules.
Kerry open their league campaign with a home fixture against Donegal in Killarney on Sunday, but O’Connor believes it will take teams quite some time before they are totally comfortable with the raft of changes.
“It’s definitely going into the unknown because as much as you can get stuff done in training and challenge games, there is no substitution for competitive football and what that brings,” he says.
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“You’ll take learnings from Sunday and from the following week and throughout the league, but it mightn’t be until the middle stages of the championship, or late in the championship, that teams really nail down exactly what is going on and what other teams are doing.”
Kerry are currently without a host of players – Stephen O’Brien and Adrian Spillane have retired, David Clifford is among those being rested, rising prospect Cillian Burke has joined AFL outfit Geelong while their Dr Crokes contingent are not expected to be available for the early rounds of the league.
The game could mark the return to intercounty action of Michael Murphy. Donegal’s 2012 All-Ireland winning captain, who was a member of the FRC, has rejoined the Ulster side’s squad two years after announcing his retirement.
O’Connor believes the rules will ultimately turn out be good for Gaelic football.
“They will definitely benefit the game in terms of spectators,” says the 25-year-old. “The last couple of years [the game] has kind of veered very defensively. I suppose the easiest way for teams to try to win was to set up defensively.
“With the new rules you have to be a bit more offensively minded in keeping the three players up, so that will benefit the game in terms of kicking.
“Over the last few years, you would have seen a lot of our forwards doing a lot of their work back the field. Like every other team we want our forwards to stay up the field and to do what they are best at, which is getting on the scoreboard and creating scores and hopefully winning games for us.
“I think it will make things very competitive. It will widen out the net, it will probably be a 10-team competition in terms of the All-Ireland [race] and any of the 10 teams could make a go at it.”
The anecdotal evidence arising from the challenge match circuit in recent weeks suggests one of the more problematic rules is the stipulation on handing the ball over to an opponent after conceding a free.
The penalty for not doing so in a prompt manner is for the ball to be brought forward 50m.
“It takes a bit of getting used to, because when you are growing up the first thing you are taught nearly is not to hand the ball to the opposition player,” says O’Connor.
“That you should roll it along the ground and do what you can to stop them taking a quick free. So, it is entirely unnatural. But the penalty for it is so severe that you are going to have to get used to it.”
Kerry enter the 2025 season on the back of what were disappointing campaigns in 2023 and 2024. Dublin beat the Kingdom in the 2023 All-Ireland final courtesy of two injury-time points, while Armagh edged out Jack O’Connor’s side after extra-time at the semi-final stages last summer. The manner of those defeats stung.
“It’s tough, I won’t lie about that. It takes a bit of time to get over it, particularly when it’s back-to-back years and you fail,” explains Diarmuid O’Connor.
“A lot of the squad were there back in 2020 and 2021, when we had tough defeats and we came out the right side of it [in 2022]. I suppose you’re taking those learnings and just trying to overcome it and try to improve and get better because that’s all you can do.”
Burke’s move to Australia has reheated the debate on AFL clubs signing GAA players. Jack O’Connor feels GAA clubs should receive some financial compensation if one of their rising stars is snapped up by an Aussie Rules outfit.
Diarmuid O’Connor admits there was an opportunity for him to consider AFL a few years back, but the lure of a move Down Under wasn’t enough to take the powerful Na Gaeil clubman away from home.
“There was talk of it back in the day but I wouldn’t really have had much interest, to be honest, it didn’t really appeal to me,” he says. “You grew up wanting to play for Kerry, that was my aim always.”
And he can understand the argument about GAA clubs receiving compensation.
“There’s a discussion to be had around it, if the GAA and AFL came to some sort of agreement,” he says.
“Particularly for a small club who might have put so much time into a player growing up and where there are small numbers, that it is obviously a sickener for them when they lose a player. There is probably a conversation to be had about compensation.”
– Diarmuid O’Connor was speaking at the launch of the 36th annual Lidl Comórtas Peile Páidí Ó Sé football festival, taking place from February 21st-23rd on the Dingle Peninsula with 28 teams from 15 counties participating.
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