Apart altogether from its depth and range of talent, Paudie Clifford rates this Kerry team the fittest he has played on. “It is, I think. A lot of us are coming to our peak and it’s just the years of hard work.
“It’s not like we did a lot of extra work in the gym (this year). We might have done a bit more on the pitch, started a bit earlier. But I think it’s just us coming to our peak years and our bodies developing.
“There might have been one or two fellas who felt they were a bit heavier, or the opposite, needed to put on a bit of muscle, who did that this year.
“And I know for a fact the hunger is going to be there to try and be fitter and stronger for next year.”
Speaking on The Square Ball podcast, Clifford expects manager Jack O’Connor to row back on his hints that he will now step away from the job.
“I think so. I haven’t been talking to him or anything about it, but I think he should.
“Our squad depth was underated, but it’s going to be very important for all those lads to keep pushing on. It’s no good doing it for one year. Winning two All-Irelands isn’t enough for this team. We need to keep going. There is nothing wrong with two All-Irelands but there wouldn’t be much point resting on our laurels in our peak years.”
Former Kerry star Darran O’Sullivan agrees O’Connor will find chasing back-to-back titles too sweet a carrot to resist.
“Jack would be crazy to leave. This team is not even at the peak of its powers, it’s only moving into that stage.”
The pair also made efforts to untangle the powerful and almost magical ability of Kerry footballers to get annoyed and motivated at being criticised by other Kerry footballers who they know well are only doing it to annoy and motivate them.
After the All-Ireland final win, Clifford rounded on the critics who had supposedly written off Kerry, while earlier in the season Jack O’Connor took former star Darragh Ó Sé to task for a critical Irish Times column written after the defeat by Meath, when he talked of an air of finality around Kerry’s season.
Clifford expanded: “Obviously some of the comments that were made… one of them was to be put out of our misery.
“I know Darragh meant it to get a reaction. I’d never say anything about Darragh. Darragh is the man. He definitely got a reaction.
“I think it was just that we work so hard as a team, and the management team, and fellas have wanted to play for Kerry all their lives, to be told that we’d be put out of our misery… that’s why we were so hurt about it.
“It motivates you, it motivated us. Again, we’re our own biggest critics, we reallised we underperformed as a team in some of the last few years. To only have one All-Ireland for the talent we feel we have, we fully admitted it ourselves.
“But you just use the outside noise as a motivator just to give you another edge. You know none of the comments are personal or anything like that. We knew that a lot of the comments were true, that we have underperformed in some bigger games and lost some games we could have won.”
While almost every GAA team has harnessed, at times, the power of being ‘written off coming up here today’, O’Sullivan accepted the Kingdom has limitless energy resources in this area.
“You can guarantee with some of the former players, they’re saying ‘we’ll throw the knife in here’ and we’ll see the boys coming back. There is nothing more dangerous than a wounded animal.
“I think it’s a good thing to be honest.”
Are Kerry champions of this fine art too? O’Sullivan added: “I don’t think other counties do it. Or they don’t do it as well as we do anyway.”
“It’s possible,” Clifford accepted, of Kerry’s uniqueness in this field. “There’s probably only a bit of craic in it at times. You might hop off each other if we met each other in the street. We’d be slagging each other about it. That’s kind of the way it is down here.”
Whatever way it is, Clifford suggested the reaction in-house to that infamous defeat by Meath shaped Kerry’s performances on the run to the final.
“The mindet was different on the Monday.
“We might have scraped those few games (without that defeat) but I don’t think we’d have had the three massive performances that we did.
“When you win a game, even by a point, you’re not as critical of yourselves as you should be.”
