Kerry boss O’Connor braced to renew Tyrone rivalry

Kerry boss Jack O’Connor has acknowledged that Tyrone ‘challenge’ the Kingdom psychologically more than any other county.

The Dromid man steered his county back to the Promised Land last season but he knows that defending the Sam Maguire crown won’t be easy especially with the Red Hands lying in wait this Saturday.

“Look, we had a fifty-fifty chance of getting Tyrone or Monaghan. So it’s Tyrone and, yeah, we’ll have to prepare accordingly,” he said on Monday evening.

“I never get too excited about that… When I heard it was Tyrone what do you do only just deal with the reality of it? At this stage of the Championship anyway there’s no easy teams.

“Tyrone certainly will be a tough assignment obviously, because they had a big win the last day above in Ballybofey [against Donegal], which isn’t an easy place for any team to go to as we found out the first day of this year.”

Neither team nor management can afford to look at Saturday’s game as anything other than a routine – albeit hugely important – assignment, but by the same token there is something special and exciting about the rivalry between these two great football powerhouses.

The most recent chapter in that rivalry was the 2021 All-Ireland semi-final, which Tyrone won after an epic extra-time battle, albeit that the build-up to the game was severely disrupted by widespread Covid cases in the Tyrone squad.

Does Jack O’Connor – who wasn’t Kerry manager at the time – think the defeat, and the nature of it, will feed into Kerry’s mind-set on Saturday?

“Well, I can’t talk for the players because I wasn’t involved that time, but that was a tough loss for Kerry. There were a lot of mitigating factors, that delay and all of it, but the bottom line was Tyrone got three goals on the day and Kerry got no goals and that was the deciding factor,” O’Connor said.

“This is another year, it’s two years on, we’ll be trying to put out our best version of ourselves and so will Tyrone, but once the game starts it’s about the form you have this year not two years ago.”

And what about that form? Where does O’Connor think the form of the All-Ireland champions sits right now?

“A lot of that depends on the opposition. The key then is to get the balance right. Maybe we over-corrected, didn’t quite get the balance right against Cork, but it’s all about putting pieces of the jigsaw together. I’m not too sure that any team has put the pieces of the jigsaw together consistently this year. You could pick holes in every team’s performance. So it’s about getting the pieces of the jigsaw and hoping you’ll get them all together on the day.

“That’s what you’re hoping to do with every team. Sometimes that’s easier said than done, but in general, Tyrone are a team that you’re in trouble against if you get behind, because they’re at their best counter-attacking. They invite you on and hit you on the break.”

Tyrone at their best are often seen as seen as being a particularly irritable stone in Kerry’s boot, or a cloud that gets into the collective mind of the Kingdom. Does Tyrone challenge Kerry, the players, psychologically more than any other side?

“Sure, of course they do, you know. They play a tough brand of football and there’s nothing soft about them. As well as being physically up for the game, we’ll have to be very mentally tough the next day because we will be tested mentally,” O’Connor said.

The Kerry-Tyrone rivalry goes back 20 years now, to 2003 when Tyrone bullied Kerry out of an All-Ireland semi-final that year, just a few months before O’Connor took over managing the team from the ousted Páidí Ó Sé.

“The rivalry started in 2003 and sure, look, I suppose they beat us in three Championships ‘03, ‘05 and ‘08. Kerry supporters have a long memory and I was only saying a while ago we thought we were done with Peter Canavan, but now he’s produced two sons that are ready to cut loose! It’s amazing the way the tradition comes to the fore.

“How would I characterise the rivalry? Certainly they were getting the better of us back then, but I saw somewhere today that we have beaten Tyrone in three of the last four Championship meetings. So hopefully we’ll try to keep that trend going.”