Timing is everything for Kerry footballers

By John Harrington

Going into last Sunday’s All-Ireland Hurling Final every member of the Limerick management team would have been thrilled with any sort of win over Galway, no matter how laboured or even fortunate.

But now that the dust has settled on Limerick’s hugely dominant victory, you can be sure that John Kiely and his crew will have taken enormous satisfaction from the fact that their players peaked on the biggest day of all.

Preparing your team so they're capable of hitting high notes at key moments in the season and then ending it with a crescendo is the Holy Grail for all management teams serious about winning the Liam MacCarthy or Sam Maguire Cups.

Jack O’Connor’s Kerry footballers did in last year’s championship and the fact they’re in Sunday’s All-Ireland Final suggests they’ve timed their run nicely again this year.

It’s no simple science. An S&C coach could present you with a periodised training plan designed to have your players at the peak of their physical powers in the second half of July, but there’s far more to consider than that.

You’re not going to make it to the second half of July at all if you can’t hit a high level physically earlier in the season whilst not going so hard, so soon, that you risk burn-out.

The confidence of the playing group must be sufficiently robust to survive a set-back or two, players will come in and out of form so a manager must cut his cloth to suit, and then there’s also the tactical balancing act of implementing game plans that take a variety of considerations into account, from the weather to the opposition.

One of the reasons that this Kerry team under Jack O’Connor are one win away from retaining the Sam Maguire Cup is because they recognise that a one size fits all approach simply doesn’t work over the course of a multi-faceted season.

“I think there's definitely three distinct phases in the year now,” says Kerry selector and coach, James Costello.

“The league is what it is, rain and wind and the rules, you see the best and the worst of the rules with the two-pointers and the kick-outs becoming a major issue. It's long kick-outs and breaking ball and two-pointers.

“Then you have the provincial championships and the early rounds of the All-Ireland which is kind of something in between. The ground is starting to harden up but you have a bit of variation in the play and then you get to Croke Park in the middle of the summer with the sun shining and it's a completely different game again.

“So, I think that couple of weeks before the Kildare game (in Round 2B of the All-Ireland SFC) was a good reset for us to get into summer football.

“Before then you can't really kick the ball or move the ball like we want to, so we needed that reset to bring our A-game back to the fore.”

Getting Kerry to Sunday’s All-Ireland Final has required a careful measuring and balancing of resources over the course of the season by Jack O’Connor and his backroom team.

Injuries to key players was a recurring theme throughout the League and much of the championship and took a lot of managing.

“Fragmented is the word I'd use, it was very fragmented,” says Costello.

“We’d fellas coming back in every week, every two weeks, new bodies coming into the building.

“So, you know, I think Jack earned his corn this year as a manager and I think his experience was huge just in terms of managing that.

“You know, a lot of other counties play their championship, they get an off-season and they all come back together, whereas we had fellas coming in dribs and drabs. Just managing their return-to-play and when to press on with a player because we needed a league point or two and when to back off, that was the most challenging thing for this year.”

Despite having to cobble together teams on a week-by-week basis, Kerry made it to the League Final.

That must have felt like a pyrrhic victory of sorts though when they were ripped apart in it by a ravenous Donegal team who beat them by 13 points.

The manner of the defeat was concerning for Jack O’Connor and his management team, but with the benefit of hindsight now they can see that the League campaign as a whole was a positive one that set them up nicely for a tilt at championship glory.

“Of course, we were worried,” admits Costello. “Donegal are an exceptional team, no one holds them in higher regard than we do, but we were after coming off a game up in Armagh the week before where our physical numbers, GPS and all that, was at something we hadn't hit all year.

“We'd come back down the road and then went back up the road. We were tired and leggy and Donegal were really, really sharp, but I think the thing again, it's about timing a run, take the learnings, we learned a huge amount that day, we tried to set up different ways defensively, we tried out a few things and then you fine tune your game plan to attack the summer.

“Getting to the League Final wasn't something we set out to do. I think what was important was to try and stay in Division 1 because I watch a huge amount of football and in Division 1 there's a huge variation of styles and I think being exposed to those styles throughout the league sets you up well for the Championship.

“It's not the pace of the game or anything like that, it's just the different styles that you come across. So, I think it was a good campaign. We do an awful lot of heavy lifting in the League in terms of our coaching, our reviews, our previews.

“So, I think it was a good campaign in terms of learnings that we brought into Championship.”

After the League Final the Kerry panel flew out to Portugal for a five day warm weather training camp.

They picked up a few more injuries out there which wasn’t part of the plan, but it still served as a very useful exercise in terms of psychologically and tactically resetting ahead of the championship.

“Just in terms of time spent together a lot of the heavy lifting tactically is done in the meeting rooms over cups of coffee so it's really good from that point of view and in terms of changing the mindset into summer football,” says Costello.

“It's a mental and a physical thing. But we did pick up knocks and you'd have to credit the boss.

“I thought he did a very good job of managing the whole group. He has a reference bank in his head of similar situations that he can default to lead us through it.”

In his dealings with the media O’Connor can sometimes come across as a taciturn taskmaster, but Costello paints a different picture of someone whose man-management skills plays a big role in getting his players to play to their full potential.

“He's a lot better craic than I thought he was! He's good fun around the place and I think the big thing you'd learn from him is, in the weeks leading up to a big game, it's all about energy and freshness.

“He really wants the lads to go out and express themselves on the big day. We won't be filling their heads with too much.

“It's getting them away from football, enjoying the build-up and going out and expressing themselves.”

Before delivering their devastating All-Ireland Final performance last Sunday, Limerick had to really grind out their two previous victories in the championship – over Clare in the All-Ireland semi-final and Cork in the Munster Final.

Kerry’s path to Sunday’s All-Ireland SFC Final against Mayo has been somewhat similar.

They weren’t always at their free-flowing best against either Dublin in the semi-final or Tyrone in the quarter-final but they still found a way to win two ferociously contested matches, so perhaps they too are now perfectly primed to really cut loose this Sunday as Limerick did last Sunday.

“We probably haven't delivered a 70-minute performance all year, and that's something we're aware of too,” says Costello.

“What I will say is our game management has been good this year. We found ways to win games, which it's all about. It's all about staying alive. Nobody will care about quarter-finals or semi-finals.

“So, we found ways to win without hitting our A game, as we like to call it, as much as we want. But having said that, as you guys well know, All-Ireland Final Day takes on a life of its own, it's a game of its own, it stands alone.

“You could have been playing brilliant going into it and not perform, or you mightn't be performing and you could hit form on the day. It's one day, it's a snapshot in time. Let's see what we can produce.”