GAA: Mick O'Dwyer has intimated he would not rule out a return to Kerry in the future as team manager and also revealed that since he left the post in 1988 he was always available but never got the call to manage the county again.
Asked on Radio Kerry's Kerry Today programme if he was going to keep going much longer, O'Dwyer was surprisingly candid: "Well, as the Bomber Liston said one time there about four or five years ago, he said he could see me training his son and Ogie might be thinking the same, so you never know, I could be you know, maybe Kerry might like to get me back again some day, one never knows."
When asked was he offering his services, O'Dwyer, now managing Laois, replied: "Well of course my services were always available from the day I left back in 1988 but nobody ever asked me to come back so there you are, you cannot go into a job unless you are asked, so that's the way it is."
O'Dwyer agreed the Kerry job is one of the toughest of all. "We had rocky patches as well I can tell you, we had a great win in 1975 but then again in 1976 and 1977 Dublin came and beat us in those big games and a big coup went on in the county to get rid of myself and Gerald McKenna but I am telling you,Gerald McKenna was some man, one of the greatest GAA men I ever came across. The coup failed anyway and I came back to continue with Kerry and then I went on to win seven All-Irelands after that.
"It's amazing really because the minute you lose in Kerry they want to get rid of you and for what reason you would often wonder. I mean the same thing happened to Páidí Ó Sé this year, because I suppose he had three years there when things did not go his way. But still Kerry were competing at the top and you cannot be winning all the time, you are going to have bad patches. After all good runs, you will find that you will always have a valley. Generally if you can weather through that valley, there will always be high points in Kerry . . . I live the game, I think about the game and my whole life is about the game, that's the way it has been and I hope it will continue for a good while yet."
