Heading into his eighth All-Ireland final but just his second against an Ulster team, Jack O’Connor was content to firmly push aside the notion that facing northern teams made any difference to him.
“It doesn’t matter who you beat in an All-Ireland final,” he said to Newstalk. “It’s the same value. There’s no asterisk after your name any year you win it. It’s something the media latch on to more than management or players.”
In this, he is consistent. Twenty years ago, asked about how special it would be to beat Tyrone in the 2005 final, he dismissed the notion. “It’s not like they’re giving two All-Irelands for this final.”
It’s the admirable transactional attitude of Kerry. No matter, as long as the titles are racked up by the end of the year.
There is, however, a slight peevishness about what are considered the insufferable conceits and pretensions of northerners, and ironically, one of the most vivid articulations of this was in O’Connor’s memoir, Keys to the Kingdom.
“They talk about how they did it, they go on and on about this theory and that practice as if they’d just split the atom. They build up a mythology about themselves. That doesn’t sit well in Kerry, where a man with four All-Ireland medals would quietly defer to another man who has five.”
For something he discounted as a media construct, it seemed to sting O’Connor at the time into the ultimate and generally unspoken Kerry put-down: show us your medals.
Not that he has been shy about borrowing, from acknowledging that he adopted tackle drills from the Ulster Council website to unabashedly recruiting Tyrone coach Paddy Tally for his third coming.
The northern problem isn’t exclusively Jack O’Connor’s. Despite losing just once in a championship to northern counties in the first 49 years of the GAA’s existence – an All-Ireland semi-final to Antrim, loftily dismissed as being because Kerry players were hungover – the matches between the county and Ulster opponents developed a different dynamic.
Whereas Kerry have a healthy All-Ireland final trading balance with the representatives of the other two provinces, they are running at just 45 per cent against Ulster teams. Some of the other meetings have also been consequential.
In 1933, Kerry’s first attempt at five-in-a-row was stopped in the semi-finals by a Cavan team on the way to winning Ulster’s first All-Ireland. Since then, there have been the breakthrough wins of Down, Armagh, Tyrone and Donegal have included Kerry scalps along the way.
This was well summarised by Maurice Hayes, the influential Down administrator and later member of the Seanad, talking about how his county had targeted the Kerry orthodoxies of catch-and-kick and fixed position play.
Ulster innovation has played a big role in O’Connor’s managerial career. Each of the three times he was appointed, Tyrone were All-Ireland champions and although on his most recent accession he appeared only dimly aware of the coincidence, the events were demonstrably connected.
All three of those Tyrone triumphs included defeating Kerry, once in a final and twice in semi-finals, including the famous 2003 match with its images of swarm tackling and harassed players in green and gold.
O’Connor was coming in to restore order, which he invariably did. After the 2004 win, then county chair Seán Walsh didn’t mince his words. “We are delighted that it took a Kerry team to restore the pride in Gaelic football.”
The following year, O’Connor had no better luck than his predecessor Páidí Ó Sé in dealing with Tyrone in the All-Ireland final but overall, his record against northern teams is good.
Sunday will his 16th championship match against an Ulster county and the balance is 11-4 – but the issue is the weight attached to those four defeats. They came in the 2005 All-Ireland final (Tyrone), a quarter-final when champions in 2010 against Down (of all counties!), another quarter-final two years later against Sunday’s opponents, Donegal, who were on the way to the title and last year’s semi-final against Armagh.
Kieran McGeeney’s team were also bound for All-Ireland success, but for the first time this year O’Connor was able to inflict revenge on a team that had eliminated his in the previous championship. Often Kerry would go looking the next season but there was nobody there.
It was Eamonn Fitzmaurice, a former lieutenant of O’Connor on and off the field, who accomplished a rare feat: a Kerry team upstaging Ulster opposition tactically when he sent out the team that defeated Donegal in 2014 by facing down Jim McGuinness’s side by mimicking their own strategy.
Armagh All-Ireland winner Steven McDonnell tweeted in the aftermath: “Congrats to Eamonn Fitzmaurice. He adapted a plan to beat an incredible system and came out on top. Well done Kerry & hard luck to Donegal.”
That same day O’Connor was in charge of the county minors, who were doubling up against Donegal and winning a first All-Ireland in 20 years. Emulating that this weekend would be a perfect way to wrap up a fifth title and, potentially, a significant career.
