Jack’s Back: Former Kerry boss brings new hope to Lilywhites
Kildare is a home away from home for former Kerry boss Jack O’Connor. He went to college there, lived there and his two sons are based there. Now retired from teaching, it feels like the perfect challenge as he follows in the footsteps of fellow south Kerryman Mick O’Dwyer, who took the county to great heights
THE circumstances are different but the irony of Jack O’Connor’s first competitive fixture as Kildare manager won’t have been lost on him this week as they host Longford in an O’Byrne Cup opener in Newbridge today.
Longford again, deja-vu for Jack. It was almost 16 years ago when he found himself on a sideline with a Kerry senior team for the first time in a competitive environment in Pearse Park, a first round Division 1A league match.
It should have provided a nice, gentle introduction to life as Kerry manager, a quick fix to assuage any lingering doubt that he wasn’t the right choice to replace Páidí Ó Sé.
But when they were hit by a late sucker-punch goal, there was no recovery from a 3-7 to 1-12 deficit that provided him with a most inauspicious start.
Driving home from the north midlands that evening the ground could have swallowed him up, he would subsequently acknowledge, and he wouldn’t have cared.
A colleague in Coláiste na Sceilge put up a picture on a staff noticeboard from that stormy day of the new manager wearing a woollen cap with harrowed look, but the joke wore a little thin.
Kerry football can be the harshest environment for a manager and Jack didn’t have the medals on his chest that could have protected him from the slings and arrows.
As he recalls now, though, it didn’t work out too badly for Kerry as they won the league and regained the All-Ireland title.
“We recovered then and I think it was the only game we lost that season, ’tisn’t a bad omen,” he laughs.
Broadened
Kildare won’t be short of expectation either. It’ll be a lot different from home nonetheless, but Jack’s arrival in the Lilywhite county, 29 years after Mick O’Dwyer made the same journey from south Kerry for the first time, has broadened ambitions.
“We’d be hoping that the team will have a bit of success and that interest will increase. In Dwyer’s time here the following for Kildare was fanatical,” he recalls.
“We’re hoping that support will come back on board again. They have big plans, they are developing St Conleth’s Park and Hawkfield as well, a new gym. The playing pitches are fantastic there. A lot of big plans on that side of it. The next thing is a bit of success on the field.”
It’s the right job for him at the right time. His recent retirement from teaching offers him time to think and focus on a seven-hour round trip from deepest south Kerry.
“That’s the part that appeals to me with this, that I can give it my full attention. An inter-county job more or less demands full attention because it is as demanding as it wants to be. There is always some angle to cover.
“The fact that I’m retired helps me to devote full attention to it. You can’t be going to training cranky and your head full of other stuff. It has to be clear and you have to be constantly thinking about it because there are always players who have needs. They need attention, a quiet word of encouragement.”
Familiarity with Kildare is quite strong. Sons Cian and Éanna have been based there in recent years as schoolteachers themselves and key components of a Moorefield team that has enjoyed dominance through the decade. For his part, Jack has helped out coaching Moorefield in recent years and now Ross Glavin, the former Moorefield manager, is reciprocating that arrangement.
“I just retired from teaching in May. I was planning on having a year where there would be no football and in those years they would have been fairly scarce now, 30 years almost. I was planning on bits and pieces, travelling. This offer came up. It does help the fact that I have been up here. That’s different than going into a county where I would know nobody and I would have no roots as such.
“I’d have an idea of the scene there. It wasn’t that much of a leap of faith. There is a good passion for football in Kildare, a good playing population here. The odds are there is a bit of improvement in them.”
Those roots dig deeper from his time as a student in Maynooth where he studied an Arts degree and took a HDip.
“I played there for a couple of years. I had two brothers actually in Leixlip, Paddy was a garda in Cabra, played a bit with Oliver Plunketts with Jim and Bernard Brogan (snr). I had another brother Joe, in Captain’s Hill where Confey is now, Jacko (O’Shea) lived in the same estate at the time. I lived with both of them for a while; my connections go back.”
His journey from his St Finan’s Bay home deep in south Kerry to Newbridge presents a striking comparative population scale that he can’t fail to shake from his head.
“The population (south Kerry) is declining alarmingly. It’s frightening the numbers up here. Someone told me that in Newbridge town alone there are almost 4,000 national school kids Where I come from in south Kerry, which is a vast area, there is only 400, serviced by eight clubs.
“It summed up for me the way rural population is happening. It’s sad in a way how parts of Kerry have deteriorated.
“In 1999, when Coláiste na Sceilge was built, we had over 800 students; it’s almost halved now.”
His predecessors, Cian O’Neill and Jason Ryan, both came from a sports science background. Jack will bring pragmatism and experience of winning big with some of the best players of the last two decades. Already, his head is filled with tactical tweaks for different players.
Bedevilled
Daniel Flynn has returned, Paul Cribbin seems to have shaken the injuries that bedevilled him for much of 2019 and the Division 2 exodus that seems to have impacted heavily on other counties – Clare with Gary Brennan and Jamie Malone, Cavan with Dara McVeety, Conor Moynagh and Killian Clarke, Laois with Donie and Paul Kingston and Roscommon with most likely Diarmuid Murtagh and goalkeeper Darren O’Malley – has been restricted to just Ben McCormack so far, the Sarsfields man having taken off to Australia in recent weeks.
It’s not something he was accustomed to in either of his previous management spells, certainly not in Kerry.
“You have the phenomenon of players in their early 20s wanting to go travelling and that’s fine. You can’t put pressure on people who want to do that because at the end of the day, it’s an amateur organisation,
Jack O’Connor:
‘We want Kildare teams playing with freedom and expressing themselves.’
it’s their lives. They have to do what they think is best for them. So what you have to do is try to make it as enjoyable as possible so that people are attracted to it, want to be part of it. That’s the key.”
In that regard, he needs to be a salesman first before a coach and already there are signs, with a geographical approach to gym work and respect for third-level team engagement, that control won’t consume them.
“We can’t take over their lives. That’s one thing we are very adamant about, that they have lives to live. We’re not planning on eating into too much of their time. We’ll probably put a bit of the onus on themselves to do stuff away from the collective.
“A lot of players in other counties, outside of the first four or five counties, are saying to themselves, ‘Is it worth all this, is it worth the commitment and basically putting my life on hold?’
“I remember Declan O’Sullivan saying to me once, ‘Jesus Jack, with the effort we’re putting in here, we’d want to be winning it’. ‘It’ meant Sam. But how many counties are in with a realistic shot at winning it? It depends on what way you frame it for the players. What is success in the other counties?”
Which brings him to the “elephant in the room” as he puts it. Jim Gavin may have stepped away but any release of Dublin’s grip on the province is unlikely to be immediate.
He was close at hand when the genie got out of the bottle, Kerry manager when they were plundered in those pulsating last few minutes of the 2011 All-Ireland final.
Regrets? There are a few but there’s resistance to dwell at all on the refereeing that afternoon.
“We had that game more or less won but you have to give them credit for the way they went at it. One of my big regrets in that game, we had Eoin Brosnan who had played great football at centre-back and with 10 minutes to go he had to go off again with an injury. You know the way you think of everything going into a game but we hadn’t factored that in. We just didn’t have a similar player to go in and play the sweeper role that he had perfected for us that year. The middle opened up after he went off.”
In the seven years that he has been away from senior inter-county management, Gavin has been Dublin manager and so much has changed.
He’s been Kerry minor manager for two of those years (two All-Ireland titles in 2014 and 2015) and U-21/20 manager for another four.
No All-Ireland title in those years is qualified by the absence of David Clifford and Seán O’Shea, who committed to the seniors last year when they lost to Kildare in an All-Ireland semi-final by a point.
Shine
But still, it was Kerry. And there, you’re only as good as your last game. Despite the shine from the silverware he accumulated, it may, like O’Dwyer, take a leap into Leinster for past achievements to really glisten in his own county.
Big expectations in Kildare, but he’s not sure if they are merited.
“It’s not all about putting your life on hold and saying we have to win this and we have to win that. If you’re setting wild targets, it’s putting wild pressure on people.
“It’s also cramping them in that instils a bit of fear.
“We want Kildare teams playing with freedom and expressing themselves rather than having ferocious pressure on them.”