Kerry legend joins The Title
Marc O Sé
Our new columnist on his fury after brother Tomás publicly criticised him
IT WAS at a real funeral the day after a footballing one when Marc Ó Sé and Aidan O’Mahony got to read their obituaries. On the Monday after Kerry’s 11point trimming by Dublin in the league final last April they travelled to Milltown to pay their respects and afterwards retired to an alehouse for a reflective pint.
It was by pure accident that they fell upon the open paper on the pub table, with its damning assessment. O’Mahony was not up to being a sweeper, especially not against a team like Dublin, while Ó Sé was not “at the races”, it read.
Normally Ó Sé’s default setting to criticism would be to heed his late uncle Páidí’s advice, which amounted to a declaration that if yesterday’s paper was not employed as a serving platter down at the local chipper then it would most likely be handy for starting the fire.
Except Páidí’s advice never extended to how best to react when the photo byline delivering such a withering critique came straight out of the family album. ‘There we were the two of us having been named and shamed by him, and we scanning the piece at the same time.
‘I can tell you that there was a few f**ks and blinds directed at Tomás. I rang him and I said “what’s going on here?”. He explained to me that he was on the other side now and he explained that he had a job to do too,’ recalls Ó Sé.
‘To be fair to him, he did not sit on the fence and he said what he believed in and there has to be great credit given to him for that. Other fellows might sidestep that issue when there was a brother involved and look, although I hardly thought it at the time, in hindsight it was good punditry.
‘I was still the fellow with the egg on my face. It was tough, you know, but of course the whole county thought it was great craic, and Tomás was the topic of every conversation…. “jeez, did you see what he wrote about the brother”…
‘In a way it took a bit away from the game which might not have been a bad thing, but it was still eating away with me. I had it out with him and I said that he shouldn’t have done it and he agreed after but sure the damage was done at that stage and he knew that too.’
More importantly, so did Eamonn Fitzmaurice. There would be no way back for him after that four-point skinning from Bernard Brogan, even if, as ever, he would rage against the dying of the light.
Ó Sé’s speed, touch and dancing feet made him the most unlikely of cornerbacks in the first instance, and the wonder in Kerry was that given that skill-set Fitzmaurice did not see the sweeper in him.
For a month last summer, he teased Fitzmaurice with the prospect of being their ballplaying creative force but it would come to nought.
‘After the Munster final, I was fairly browned off after not getting a game. I went to Fitzmaurice and I said, “look, I will do a job for you, whatever job you want I will do it, even if you want to play me sweeper”.
‘He started playing me then on the B team as sweeper, it suited me and I was really enjoying it again, really getting into and I was going home happy every night because I felt my form was coming back.
‘I would say I set them thinking and I think Eamonn might have thought “maybe, we should have done this a few years ago”.
‘And I would have liked the thought of fulfilling that role but
there was a big part of me proud that I was still able to perform in the full-back line at 35 years of age. ‘I felt I was able to do it. Even in 2015 I was delighted with my form, and I was really happy with the way I was going in the Tyrone game until I got the black card. I never started a championship game after that for Kerry.’ And so, in the end, a career that had blazed brightly eventually flickered out; his last offering coming off the bench in the dying embers of last year’s semi-final defeat to Dublin. That would be the end. There was no hand-wringing after that, he had made his mind up at the start of the year that this would be it. Along with the lack of game-time after that league final, his aching 36-year-old body was beginning to tell him something. Every time he descended the stairs at his Tralee home after training last year, it screamed at him to hop off the treadmill.
‘I knew it was going to be my last year anyway, it was always going to be my last year. There was one night I was inside in training and I was on Conor Geaney – who is a new kid on the block who I would say will see game-time in the National League.
‘I marked him and I did okay on him but after training I asked him his age and he told me he was 18.
‘I went away that evening saying to myself “ah look, I am 18 years older than this fellow so there has to be a place called stop”.’
It is also why, as Kerry head for Letterkenny today to kick-start their annual obsession, he won’t really mourn not being there.
And there is little mystery as to how he fills the void created by ending his 16-year association with Kerry. As he cradles his six-month old son Tadhg in the Tralee home he shares with his partner Ellen, he points to a weekend diary bursting at the seams.
He took charge of Tralee CBS, where he teaches, in the Munster colleges semi-final against Coláiste
Chríost Rí yesterday, before hightailing it up to Castlebar for last night’s Mayo/ Monaghan league match where he made his debut as an analyst for Eir Sport.
He is back down to West Kerry today to attend to his duties for Gaeltacht, where he is joint manager – he has recruited Dara Ó Cinnéide as coach – and will continue to play on for his home club.
And from next week on, he will take to these pages to ink his thoughts on a game which still utterly consumes him.
‘I have views on how the game should be played, and I am really looking forward to expressing that now in this column because that is something you are not going to do as a player because you are simply not going to draw that kind of heat on yourself,’ he admits. The pen in hand will never replace the thrill of having the ball at his foot, but he will play it with the same passion.
‘I am beginning to see it from two sides now. It is funny really, I have not even started on the media side of things but I meet some of the Kerry fellows now and I find that I am slow to ask them how things are going in training because they would not probably give me the full answer.
‘That’s it, when you are out, you are out and there is that line drawn whether you like it or not. I don’t know, I might end up climbing a tree outside Fitzgerald stadium,’ he jokes.
Whatever view he has, expect it to be a compelling one.