Tom Humphries talks to Kerry manager Jack O'Connor ahead of tomorrow's final

Go ahead and make enemies, Peter. He who lacks the qualities to make enemies also lack the qualities to make friends. - Bryan MacMahon, Hero Town

Scene; A side room. The Park Hotel, Killarney. A September evening. All the world filled with football experts. Some passing by outside. Jack O'Connor leans back on the settee and sucks in his breath. In Kerry there are always more questions than answers. Tonight is the Kerry press evening, the traditional Harvest of Yerra, when many gather to hear a few say, well, yerra nothing really. Except tonight will be different. The Kerry team will talk with a confidence and wit they normally conceal. The openness is a metaphor for Kerry's year, a season of evident wilting followed by the most surprising blossoming.

So Jack O'Connor, head gardener and much else besides, considers the question. A rough year? He thinks so. At the start of the championship and looking back there were signs in the soil earlier. For one half of the National League final Kerry played poorly. A couple of goals camouflaged other problems and anyway spring is a time when you only look for green shoots. He says they limped over the line to win the league but back then it was hard to diagnose the problem.

Even against Waterford and Tipp the pulse was weak. There was a period in the Waterford game where there was a possibility Kerry were going to become summer's first great casualties. Waterford had a penalty 10 minutes into the second half.

"If they'd scored it the fat would have been rightly in the fire. Deep down we were worried," says O'Connor. "I don't cut loose too often with the players but in the dressingroom after the game we were quite animated, to put it mildly, because it was an unacceptable performance."

By the time of the Munster final the fire was crackling with fat, the door was being pounded by chickens home to roost and the sky was dark with the mumblings of naysayers. Kerry should have lost to Cork on the first day. They were beaten on the second day. Told you so, said half the Kingdom. No, said the other half, I told you first.

Kerry didn't flatline. The chart of their summer describes the shape of a hockey stick: down to the lowest point just before the climb. And, psst, over here, contrary to myth, the word on the street always limps some way behind the truth behind dressingroom doors. By high summer the Ó Sés were walking out of dressingrooms without letting the door hit their tóineanna.

O'Connor was locking the gates in Fitzgerald Stadium to stop players escaping. Digs were being traded as if the global market in digs was about to collapse. Declan O'Sullivan had some blood pact which made him undroppable, unimpeachable, and infallible. Mutter, mutter. Trouble and strife. Even in Dromid the hum of discontent and the roar of the rumour mill must have been audible. O'Connor heard some of it, dismissed most of it. Kept on keeping on.

"We had a meeting back in the Hayfield Manor right after the game in Páirc Uí Chaoimh. We literally got on the bus and went to the hotel and went straight up to the meeting room. We had a very constructive meeting for half an hour where management spoke and players spoke and you know I think we left the room very upbeat and very together despite rumours to the contrary."

As important as holding the meeting itself was the roster of speakers. Darragh Ó Sé and Séamus Moynihan had played well. If ever their moral authority among a gathering of Kerry players had been in doubt it was beyond question that afternoon. "I suppose in many ways we were lucky two of our big leaders, Darragh Ó Sé and Séamus Moynihan, had played well that day. They were in a position to speak . . . Players' words are always better if they are playing well themselves. They showed great leadership. Basically the theme was the Munster competition was out of the way and it was a new beginning for us. The players that spoke lifted the whole atmosphere."

The management spoke too of course. After Páirc Uí Chaoimh Kerry stuck together and fought back. They caught a good break, drawn to play Longford at home a couple of weeks after that. "It gave the Kerry public a chance to come out and support the team as they hadn't done in Cork."

Ah, the Kerry public. Since Páidí's denunciation of that learned body as the roughest of animals we have new respect for Kerry managers. You take the job and spend half the time wrestling with the crocodile of public opinion. The crocodile wants success and snappy too.

"In many ways the criticism did the work of 10 sports psychologists because it bonded us . . . If anyone had broken ranks after that Cork game the whole thing was finished. There were so many conspiracy theorists out there the whole thing could have blown up in our face."

So to the rumours. We've seen the smoke. There must have been fire. What about the Ó Sé brothers abandoning the dressingroom before anyone had absorbed the defeat? O'Connor grins. Maybe you're going to ask him next if he isn't considering drafting Osama bin Laden to the panel.

"Well if you knew the Sés as long as I do you'd know they don't hang around after games . . . These guys are passionate players and they don't hang around looking to talk to reporters. They want to get out of there."

He laughs. It wasn't so much the Ó Sés had left, they just went out and sat on the bus. Everyone else clambered aboard. Everyone went to the hotel together. Hardly the mutiny on the bounty. "It isn't as if they were down in Cork city drinking pints. If they'd done that, well that would be scéal eile . . . We stuck together that night and we had a laugh. There were a few more stories the next week about fellas threatening to swing the big one and fellas having to come between us to stop fist-fights. But we were very united coming out of that game."

In those bad weeks every rumour was sponsored by some half truth.

"People fatten on that sort of stuff."

Yes. We do. One night in Killarney you had to lock them in though?

"Jesus, we're still hearing about that night. Every county can have a closed-door session. Except Kerry."

More delicate perhaps is the O'Sullivan business. O'Sullivan is a Dromid man, a clubmate and a former pupil of O'Connor's in Coláiste na Sceilge. He was brought into the panel by Páidí Ó Sé and earned his keep there. O'Connor has had to drop O'Sullivan before, at under-21 level, and this summer he dropped him again. When the player was coming off having been substituted in the Munster final replay he was subjected to an odd barracking. Having watched a player since his childhood, seeing him treated that way must have been disappointing.

"Look, I basically . . . sure of course it was totally unacceptable. What can I say? I basically felt the fans were getting at me rather than him. We had a lot of players playing poorly and my gut instinct was this was a message to me rather than to Declan O'Sullivan. I've often felt my face has never fitted with some people around the place. It was unfair on the young fella though. He wasn't playing well at the time . . . there were a whole lot of other fellas in the same boat. He got great support from the rest of the team and that was crucial. At the end of the day if you are hanging about with 30 fellas it's their support that's crucial not fellas that come two or three times a year and pay their €20 and think that they can do whatever they want."

Perception is different from reality. O'Sullivan lives in Tralee. O'Connor lives in Dromid. They didn't drive in and out to training together discussing the topic.

"No, I always drive on my own. He's living in Tralee, not down my neck of the woods anymore. I don't want to give the impression I was mollycoddling Declan O'Sullivan. I really felt deep down the crowd were getting at me more than him."

When the Kerry manaager says his face hasn't fitted in certain parts of the county he means it hasn't fitted in those rooms filled by the 70s and 80s team and their disciples. Since Mick O'Dwyer's appointment 31 years ago O'Connor is the first from outside that group to manage Kerry.

"There's a bit of a clique there. They won so much that in many ways people from outside that clique aren't supposed to win anything. Well I'm outside of that clique and outside of that group, and I sometimes feel I don't have a right to be here. O'Dwyer played and he trained the team, Ogie trained the team, Mickey Ned trained the team, Páidí trained the team. Then comes along a joker from the wilds of Dromid who has no right to be there. People are entitled to their own opinion."

"I had a bit of an issue with Pat (Spillane), who had a go at me before I started the job. I sorted that out with Pat since but I thought it was grossly unfair to be having a go at me before I started the job. You talk about Steve Staunton getting a bit of heat. At least they waited for him to have a couple of matches before they had a cut."

On Tuesday he was back in the Park Hotel in the late afternoon. Ger O'Keeffe was there and Johnny Culloty too. They sat down to pick a team for the All-Ireland final. At the weekend they had returned to the Hayfield Manor, the place where they put themselves together again. They'd played a game in Páirc Uí Chaoimh among themselves. Brian White had to referee so pleasingly intense were the exchanges. Picking a team was never going to be easy. Having had the guts to drop O'Sullivan earlier in the summer, they had the guts to reward his improved form too. In picking O'Sullivan they were aware of the sensitivities of the world immediately outside. Killarney, that is. A Crokes man, Eoin Brosnan, lost out. Another, the Gooch (Colm Cooper) himself, handed the captaincy back to Declan O'Sullivan of south Kerry.

It was a long debate and a hard one but if form justified a dropping, form permitted a resurrection. They left knowing if it goes wrong on Sunday they have handed the Kerry public a stick to beat Jack O'Connor with.

Three years of wrestling changes a man though. O'Connor's final formulation is to be true to the football, to honour the needs of the team. He knows what might be coming. He still has some of the smell of low tide in his nostrils.

"Sure, look, I got a lot of personal criticism. A couple of Sunday newspaper articles that I wasn't happy with. Basically they were lies. I have no problem with constructive criticism but there was one each week, the Sunday after the Munster final and the day of the replay. Full of lies and half truths, mostly lies, fairly personal stuff . . . . What do you do?"

He has a sense of what he would like to do. Lately he's been reading John McGahern's Memoirs. Dark stuff in the time leading to an All-Ireland final. Bit depressing for the run up to an All-Ireland, Jack? "A bit. Last year is was The Last Season by Phil Jackson." So is this the last season for you? "Ah stop. That's the plan at the moment. Who knows? You know how the job is in Kerry: you have to take one year at a time. The management said we'll give it one last shot to see if we can get the holy grail. I haven't really thought of it but that would be my instinct. Easier to go on a winning note. I have great admiration for Donal O'Grady and Pat O'Neill, who won and walked into the sunset. The hard thing is to let go. We'll give it a small bit of time after the All-Ireland."

In January he was in New York with the team. One day he got up to the Bronx for a drive. Old haunts. The pub he used to work in back in the 80s is now a hardware store but there were places that brought back good memories. He was married there, to Bridie, in the Good Shepherd Church in Upper Manhattan. He'd love to take them back. They lived there for three years. Cian, the eldest, was born there and spent the first three months of his life in New York before his parents came home with a mad notion to open a pub in Dromid. "We'd love to show him where he hung out for three months. The boys, Cian and Eanna, are 17 and 14, they need a bit more time. I'm looking forward to hanging out with them for a while."

Still he is happy he stayed on for this turbulent year. "One characteristic I would have, and this team would have, would be not quitting easily. I expected this year to be tough. The team has been together for a while. Hunger was going to be an issue. Unless you've a fairly thick skin you couldn't deal with it. My skin has got fairly thick over the last while.

" I wondered how it affected the team. I don't really put myself in situations like that anymore where people would be putting those things to me. I have a fairly regimental lifestyle. We were as together as any camp in the country. That's the main thing that bothered me - the players hanging together. Perception doesn't matter. Reality matters"

Reality was the joy he felt when the final whistle blew against Armagh. He had been there with Páidí when Armagh had taken the All-Ireland from them four years ago. He talks of Darragh Ó Sé, who captained the team that day and was heading for player of the year before it all slipped away. "A player like Darragh Ó Sé, whose father had died just days before, himself and his two brothers had played in a Munster final replay which was great testament to what they feel for the Kerry jerseys. It was a tough year on Darragh in particular. Four years later he was man of the match against Armagh. That was a great moment."

Great moments are the fuel that keep great managers going. He talks about playing Dublin in the league this year. Halfway through the second half Kerry were in trouble and the Gooch, who had been invited to come along just days after his father's burial, was suddenly out on the field and lighting the place up. His brilliance was decisive and unforgettable. Kerry made the semi-final of the league.

Great moments, the primal need for self-fulfilment. Three All-Ireland finals in three years. O'Connor knows more about himself now than he did when he started. Has the three years changed you? "Definitely. Fantastic experience. Some tough times but some really fantastic moments. I'm a better man, a wiser man and I wouldn't swap it for the world."

It's the middle of All-Ireland week. The team selection is being unveiled soon via the morning papers. Soon the website tenants and saloon-bar pundits will be debunking, disproving and dismantling everything O'Connor knows about football. He shrugs, a man with the wisdom to know the difference between perception and reality, and the serenity to know when to ignore that difference.