Adaptation key to Jack O'Connor's longevity

By John Harrington

Moving with the times is no easy thing.

Comfort is found in the familiar and so challenging yourself to adapt to changes in your environment can be daunting.

Not if you’re Jack O’Connor. 22 years after he managed Kerry to victory over Mayo in the 2004 All-Ireland Final he’ll endeavour to do the same on Sunday.

Both the game itself and managing teams at the highest level has changed a lot in the interim, but O’Connor clearly has a Darwinian ability to adapt.

He’s a very different manager now at the age of 65 than he was as a 43-year-old back in 2004.

“Look, it's night and day,” says O’Connor. “At the time, I was doing most of the coaching and Pat Flanagan was doing the training. That was more or less it.

“I had two selectors – Ger O'Keeffe and Johnny Culloty – but the backroom team was a lot smaller. The world seemed a bit simpler.

“Now I kind of have two teams. I have a team on the field and a team off the field, so my role has changed. I'm more of an overseer, more of a kind of a director now, whereas at the time I was very hands on.

“The game itself has changed obviously – changed for the better, I think – in the last while. It's very different.

“At the time, as I said, I was doing most of the coaching myself and obviously that requires huge energy and that's why maybe after three years that time and reaching three finals, I had to have a bit of a sabbatical. I think the way I'm doing it now is more sustainable and the fact that I'm retired is a massive help.

“I was trying to do this job 22 years ago when I was working full-time and it was tough going at the time because I was holding down a job and trying to do all the coaching and all the planning and whatever. It was tough going."

As well as delegating more to others, he’s now also more conscious about minding his energy than he was in the early years of his management career.

He regards physical fitness as key to mental freshness, and so every morning he’ll head off for a long walk with his dog Buddy.

It’s on these walks that he’ll do the bulk of his thinking about football so it’s out of the way early and the whole day doesn’t become an exercise in football navel gazing.

By his own admission he was far too obsessive in his early years as an inter-county manager and has learned along the way that less is more.

So when you ask him what a manager can do to help his team peak on All-Ireland Final day, he suggests it’s just as important to know what not to do.

“Sometimes you have a tendency coming up to finals to overdo it, that you think you have to do extra,” he says.

“Sometimes that's not the right thing to do. So, I think freshness is key, because All-Ireland finals take a lot of emotional energy out of you. And if you have players tired going into an All-Ireland final, you're in trouble.

“They need to be fresh, they need to be energetic, so if anything you have to pull back a bit and make sure freshness is key. That's it, in my book. I don't want to be giving Mayo any tips now but I'm sure they'll figure that out themselves.

“But yeah, that's the most important thing. It's almost like what you don't do rather than... I mean, every team prepares well for the final but sometimes there's a tendency maybe to over-analyse and overdo it."

One of the benefits of experience is that you recognise a bump in the road as nothing more than that and know that going slow and steady is a better strategy for winning a long-distance race than bursting out of the blocks.

Some people were quick to reappraise Kerry’s ability to successfully defend the Sam Maguire Cup this year when they were walloped in the Allianz Football League Division 1 Final by Donegal.

O’Connor is a competitive animal so the scale of the defeat stung for sure, but he wants his team to peak at the end of a season rather than half-way through one.

“I felt that they were going awfully well very early,” he says of Donegal. “I know from down through the years that it's all about timing.

“I remember as far back as 20 years ago, in 2006, we played Mayo in a league game in Tralee in the month of February. They beat us by three or four points.

“I remember being interviewed afterwards by the journalist and I said they're fair men if they keep that going to September.

“Now, we met them in September again and by that stage we'd caught up with them and we won that final. So, yeah, it is all about timing.

“Look, you'd have to say that both Kerry and Mayo are kind of coming pretty right at a good time. Mayo seem to be developing and progressing and getting better game by game.

“Someone asked me the other day, 'What's the secret formula?' For us, there is no secret formula. Everyone seems to think we have this kind of a master plan. A lot of our timing had to do with the fact that we had a lot of players injured and they're only now in the last couple of games finding their feet.

“Almost by accident – it's not by design anyway – they're fresh and they're hopefully improving coming towards the final."

So too are Mayo, which adds a layer of intrigue to Sunday’s Final.

Kerry are hot favourites with good reason, but if Mayo’s performance level can improve to the same extent again that it did from the quarter-final win over Cork to the semi-final win over Louth, then the result may not be a foregone conclusion.

A lot has changed in the 22 years that have passed since Jack O’Connor first managed the Kerry senior footballers, but underestimating an opponent is no less dangerous now than it’s ever been and he’s not the type to fall into that trap.

"All I know is that they have a very exciting forward line, particularly those young lads,” he says. “And Ryan O'Donoghue is obviously in Player of the Year form.

“But those young fellas, like Darragh Beirne and Kobe McDonald, they've given the Mayo followers real hope. Kobe McDonald is the nearest we've seen to David Clifford. He's the Mayo version of David Clifford.

“You'll remember all the hype about David when he started off with Kerry after his exploits underage. They've really latched onto this team, the Mayo followers, and they've given them great hope.

“The manager has backed youth and they've backed him. That's a potent mix."