AFTER SUCH A bruising experience at the hands of the All-Ireland champions last Saturday night, Kerry needed to mount a recovery operation.
It had been a week of introspection in the Kingdom camp, shipping 3-18 to a Dublin team inspired by Con O’Callaghan, and ten points short of parity by the final whistle.
In front of their home crowd in Fitzgerald Stadium this afternoon, Jack O’Connor saw his team get back on track.
“It was a tough week, no doubt about it, a lot of soul-searching, a lot of conversations. I have to say that the players, and everybody in the back-room team, responded and stuck together. That’s all you can do in a week like that. You’re just hoping that the work you do then, two decent training sessions, is then transmitted onto the game.
“I tell you, if we had two or three weeks to be thinking about the display in Croke Park, I’d say we’d have to move out of the house. It was great to have a game so quick, and particularly here in the stadium. The lads like the stadium, it’s a good footballers’ pitch.
“There was (bite to training) and it was needed because sometimes you can have all the tactics in the world, but a lot of times it just comes down to attitude. If your attitude, and your mindset, isn’t right, everything else goes out the window.
“I was glad that was pretty right today, by and large. There was a lot of the things we were looking for, were better like attitude and work rate and we were better on the kickouts. We got a bit sloppy near the end, kicked away a bit of ball, I felt the game was a bit closer than it should have been. So we have to learn from that.”
Kerry’s opening to the game had been littered with errors. The fracas that erupted around the first-quarter mark, which yielded three yellow cards, appeared to rouse Kerry. They outscored Tyrone 0-12 to 0-4 over the next half hour or so of action.
“I’m not too sure what caused it, it was a line ball or something,” reflected O’Connor.
“It certainly seemed to put a bit of life into our fellas. Sure what’s wrong with that? Maybe we were a bit nervous (at the start), there’s big pressure on these players to perform, particularly after the display the last night.
“Maybe after that I thought we played with a bit of fury, a bit of drive, and played off the cuff a bit. We got the ball forward a bit quicker. I just thought we were a bit cautious early on.”
Kerry started without forwards Dylan Geaney and Cillian Burke due to injury.
“They tweaked hamstrings there in the Dublin game. Players are pulling hamstrings like guitar strings at the moment, you saw it last night as well with McLaughlin from Mayo and Lee Gannon from Dublin.
“They’re three very intense games in three weeks. Ideally you probably wouldn’t want that. It’s probably asking a lot of amateur players in sometimes heavy ground.
“Brian [O Beaglaoich] is close, he’s up to 80 %or 90% but we just have to be cautious with him because he had a similar injury last year and it just lingered. So he’s getting there and he’s making huge progress. Tom [O’Sullivan] is the same. In a couple of weeks, he should be back in the frame.”
