O'Connor's resilience a real asset for Kerry

By John Harrington

It’s a testament to Diarmuid O’Connor’s resilience that he played any part in last year’s All-Ireland Football Final victory over Donegal for Kerry.

He suffered three shoulder dislocations in the space of little more than three months, the last of which happened just five weeks before the All-Ireland Final.

His entire championship campaign was a frustrating sequence of injury, rehab, injury, rehab, but he was rewarded for his perseverance by somehow getting his body in the shape necessary to come on after 50 minutes of the All-Ireland Final.

“It was difficult,” admits O’Connor. “I would have been really, really happy with that work I put at the end of 2024 coming into 2025 in terms of pre-season.

“I got the body in a really good spot. I’d gone back training early doors. We’d an early finish to the club season previously to that, so I got my rest in, my pre pre-season done on my own, and I came in then in the pre-season with Kerry and put a really good batch of that in and I took a lot of confidence in that going into the start of the league.

“I felt I was playing really well, enjoying the kick-outs with the new rules and all those kind of things and it was difficult in terms of the injury. You take that set-back and you try and take the positives from it.

“When it happens again it’s a small bit more difficult to get over, and when it happens a third time it’s obviously very testing. All you’ve to do is to look around our dressing room and you’ll see fellas who’ve come back from serious injuries before, who’ve shown serious resilience, you take lessons from them.

“You talk to guys who’ve been in a similar position. All you can do is put your head down, work hard, and hope that things work out.

“And look, thankfully, managed to get back for the final last year and contribute something in the last twenty minutes.”

After Kerry’s All-Ireland Final victory over Donegal, O’Connor then pushed his body through the pain barrier once more for his club Na Gaeil.

He couldn’t play midfield because he was effectively operating with only one arm, so instead he did a job for them in attack and played a huge role in their progress to the club’s first ever Kerry Senior Club Championship Final.

“I suppose the reason that I was able to play on after the All Ireland for those couple of weeks is because the surgery date had actually been pushed back anyways,” he says.

“With the injury I had there was actually no danger of making it any worse. So we made a decision, we'd have a crack off the club season, and see where it went.

“We went on that bit of a run and I was never going to pull out of that stage. I suppose it was just the fact that I knew I couldn't make it any worse in terms of damage, that the surgery was going to lock it down regardless.

"So I was happy enough with the medical team just to give it a go and give something back to the club because I missed a massive amount of football at that stage anyways and I just wanted to be back on the field trying to contribute something.

“The shoulder is a funny one in that it can feel perfect, but you can roll over in the bed and it could pop out. Obviously you have to be careful in terms of your play within the game, you're not gonna be open hand tackling, and you're not gonna be going up jumping for ball and things like that, and I was nearly playing as more of an inside forward for the club.

“Those couple of weeks you kind of learn to play the game a small bit differently to what you might be used to. It was debilitating, but you just kind of managed to push on over it.”

He finally went under the knife on October 2^nd last year, and the rehabilitation was a lengthy one that required a lot of patience.

“It was the bones of six months,” he says. “I think I trained fully the Wednesday after the League Final. The Wednesday after the league final this year, I trained fully and we were going off to camp then.

“So that was kind of always my target really was to make to make the camp. Initially we were given a time frame that you might be able to get back for maybe a latter stage of a league game or something like that, but just the way the shoulder was recovering and the way it was healing and I had a bit of a groin issue as well that I had to take care of.

“We just decided that the training camp would have been a really, really good target and would have set my stall then for the rest of the year.”

He made his comeback in Kerry’s Munster SFC semi-final victory over Clare on April 25 and has been one of the team’s most consistent performers on the way to Sunday’s All-Ireland Final.

Better known as midfielder, he's been repurposed as a wing-forward this year to good effect.

He and Joe O’Connor on the other wing are work-horses who get up and down the field all day, take the occasional score, and provide Kerry with a great ball-winning platform from kick-outs.

“It’s not too dissimilar to playing midfield really,” says O’Connor.

“A lot of the requirements of playing in the middle eight are very similar from five to twelve. You’re doing a lot of tracking, you’re doing a lot of tackling, you’re under kick-outs, you’re trying to contribute to scores where you can, so those middle eight are doing a lot of the same jobs, with bits of nuances in between.

"I suppose in terms of match-ups like obviously the 8 and 9 are going to be a match-up with their 8 and 9 primarily. You might find yourself on a quicker wing-back than, let's say, a rangy 8 or 9.

“So you have to be prepared for that in terms of defensively. Is he left or right-footed, does he carry the ball, does he kick the ball, does he have any shimmy or trick or anything like that?

“So that's one of the things you definitely have to be wary of and definitely one of the nuances I was talking about.

“I would have played a lot of football at 12 growing up with Na Gaelic, played there (with Kerry) my first year minors, first year with the seniors would have been wing-forward as well. So it's not something I'd be uncomfortable with.”

The ball-winning platform that Kerry now have in the middle third with men like O’Connor, Seán O’Brien, Mark O’Shea, and Seán O’Shea is one of the reasons why they’re such hot favourites to make it back-to-back All-Ireland titles.

Mayo haven’t been as good as securing primary ball in the middle third, so it seems like an obvious advantage the Kingdom will have. O’Connor doesn’t view it in such simplistic terms though.

“When you win that ball you have the opportunity to get that ball in fast but the other side of that then is teams are so good defensively now that there might only be that split second before that real option is cut out, so it’s not as black and white as winning the ball and kicking it in to the boys,” he says.

“Teams are really working hard defensively on kick-outs and shielding and things like that. That’s just something you have to be wary of as well, you can’t just win it and kick it in.

“We’ve been reasonably happy with some elements of the kick-out, but there’s other areas we know we need to work on as well. Obviously, we did very well against Tyrone on our own kick-outs.

“And Dublin then really did a job on us as well, so we know Mayo are really going to go after us in terms of that. Like all teams would aim to do.

“So, we just have to be flexible, going to have to think on our feet and get ball in hand.”