In the end, it was probably no great surprise that Kerry plumped for another dance with Jack O'Connor. By high-tailing it from Kildare in such an abrupt manner, he wasn't exactly subtle in his intentions. The Kerry County Board was under no obligation to facilitate said intentions, of course. But in a situation where the stakes were already high anyway, it was a move that fairly juiced the pot.
Kerry could have gone back to Peter Keane or they could have started completely afresh with Stephen Stack and his roll-call of All Stars. But once O'Connor did everything short of taking an ad out in the Kerryman proclaiming his availability, he became the central character in the whole process. His presence immediately gave it the flavour of a byelection, a flat-out race with winners and losers and let's have a look at what you could have won.
In the GAA, managerial appointments are most often about who you can get. For all the big noise surrounding inter-county gigs, in most cases there is an obvious candidate and the job is generally theirs if they want it. They might have to do a bit of an oul’ presentation to the county board just so the thing looks right but, in the main, there isn’t a massive need for flesh-pressing or politicking.
If anything, in fact, it’s often the other way around. The awful truth of the matter is that being an inter-county manager just isn’t a job that a lot of people are interested in. The hours are ridiculous, the fundraising side of it is a humongous pain in the ass, the local press are a shower of doses, and your kids get to hear you called exotic names when they go to matches.
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The braver choice would have been to go with Stack and a backroom team that included Donie Buckley, Seamus Moynihan, Dara O'Cinnéide, Mickey Ned O'Sullivan, Joe O'Connor and Aidan O'Mahony
There’s never enough time, there’s never enough money and there’s never, ever enough players. No matter what you do, you’re still going to find yourself three points down halfway through the second half somewhere, looking into the stand half hoping to catch a glimpse of a sub you’d forgotten about. But you have what you have and it generally ain’t David Clifford.
Fast talking
That’s why a lot of the time, it’s the county board who has to do the fast talking to get the wanted man on board. Especially these days, when the gap between the jungle beasts and the forest floor furries is wider than ever. The idea of a three-way face-off between highly qualified candidates would draw a wry laugh out of the vast majority of county chairmen. Chance would be a fine thing.
The race for the Kerry job was different. It wasn’t just that they actually do have David Clifford and the rest of what is, at worst, a highly capable group of players. It was that in the simple act of inserting himself into the mix, O’Connor ramped up the jeopardy involved.
It’s hard not to appoint a three-time All-Ireland winner who wants the job. It’s especially hard not to do it when he has shown he’s prepared to take an almighty amount of flak just by putting himself up for it. O’Connor knew well that his defection from Kildare would go down badly, yet he shrugged and did it anyway, purely on the basis that Kerry is Kerry. It would have been a brave county board that ignored that sort of devotion to the sod.
It was clearly much easier to ignore the claims of Peter Keane. Three years without an All-Ireland has generally spelled the end of Kerry managers since Mick O’Dwyer’s time. Keane was unlucky here and there and the players clearly had good time for him. But nobody could argue that they have improved since the 2019 All-Ireland final. In that context, change was a straightforward imperative.
The braver choice would have been to go with Stack and a backroom team that included Donie Buckley, Seamus Moynihan, Dara O'Cinnéide, Mickey Ned O'Sullivan, Joe O'Connor and Aidan O'Mahony. Stack has been a decent club manager and the others have all been involved with teams to varying levels of success over the past decade. It would have been a leap into the unknown – too great a leap for the committee, evidently – but then these appointments always are.
Safer option
The leap they have taken might feel like the safer option, but of course O’Connor’s All-Ireland winning background guarantees nothing. Past performance is no indication of future results, and all that. His last senior All-Ireland was in 2009 and the sport has undergone at least two major transformations in the meantime in terms of playing style, and is about to launch into a structural redraw. The Jack O’Connor who won All-Irelands in the 2000s might not be overly relevant here.
If the manager of the Kildare footballers for the past two seasons was anyone other than O’Connor, that person wouldn’t be in the running for the Kerry job or indeed any of the big jobs at the top of the sport. They missed promotion one year, got it the second. They made a Leinster semi-final one year, made the final the second. They advanced from where they were when he took over but you wouldn’t say they pulled up many trees or made any particularly noteworthy statements.
So it will be fascinating to see what he does with Kerry now. He comes in as the appointment they felt they couldn’t afford not to make. The returning All-Ireland winner who wet-nursed a batch of these Kerry youngsters through their minor and under-21/20 days. Maybe even the flash of steel and belligerence they need to turn themselves from talented next big things to actual champions.
One of O’Connor’s greatest skills has always been to massage the chip on his shoulder and put it to work. He is the only man ever to be given the Kerry job three times yet he still manages to see himself as an outsider. The next Kerry team to win an All-Ireland will need a genuine streak of that crankiness and temper mixed through it.
The greatest trick Kerry football ever pulled was to convince the world that they were all about languid kicking and dummy solos and willowy inside forwards making the ball sing. But ultimately, they have always had success because they have always been the great pragmatists.
They’ve won one of the last 12 All-Irelands. They had a chance to appoint a man who won three in the previous six. They took it. Strip away all the chat and intrigue and the whole episode probably wasn’t much more complicated than that.
