{"id":539026,"date":"2026-07-08T10:27:12","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T10:27:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/539026\/"},"modified":"2026-07-08T10:27:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T10:27:12","slug":"jack-oconnor-kerry-cant-continue-to-play-three-championships-it-is-crazy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/539026\/","title":{"rendered":"Jack O’Connor: Kerry can\u2019t continue to play three championships… It is crazy"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s hard to argue with Jack O\u2019Connor\u2019s contention that Dublin have timed their run to perfection.<\/p>\n

Part of football\u2019s last-four line-up is a side that very nearly slipped on a Wicklow banana skin on the opening day out in Leinster.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Their response to losing the provincial final was to concede 4-18 when falling to the Louth side they\u2019d comfortably overcome just four weeks earlier.<\/p>\n

And yet here they still stand, Sam Maguire<\/a> contenders Donegal and Galway dumped out by the rejuvenated Blues over the past three weeks.<\/p>\n

So whatever mind games are at play ahead of Sunday’s All-Ireland SFC semi-final,<\/a> Jack O’Connor stating the obvious regarding the timing of Dublin\u2019s run ain\u2019t nothing of that sort.<\/p>\n

Of course, no county in recent times has succeeded in timing their run better than Kerry did last summer.<\/p>\n

The outstanding factor in getting that right, according to Jack, is availability of players. But in a title-defending season where a dominant Kerry theme has been the unavailability of first-team figures, the manager reckons that in some strange, roundabout way, the clean slate of Paudie Clifford, Se\u00e1n O\u2019Shea, Gavin White, Paul Geaney, Diarmuid O\u2019Connor, Graham O\u2019Sullivan, Joe O\u2019Connor, Se\u00e1n O\u2019Brien, Paul Murphy, and Tom O\u2019Sullivan could work to Kerry\u2019s advantage as players are so ravenous to compensate for the large swathes of the season they spent sidelined.<\/p>\n

\"KerryKerry footballers Joe O’Connor and Se\u00e1n O’Shea. Pics: Ray McManus\/Sportsfile<\/p>\n

O\u2019Shea, for example, got 24 minutes last Saturday week to go with the first 16 minutes of championship 2026 he banked against Armagh the weekend previous.<\/p>\n

Gavin White, meanwhile, made his first start of the year against Tyrone. That he was able to last the 70 minutes was deemed \u201cremarkable\u201d by his boss.<\/p>\n

The \u201ccalculated gamble\u201d of throwing in \u201cundercooked\u201d players and hoping the games will bring them on has not yet backfired.<\/p>\n

Having claimed following the win in Newbridge that Kerry had spent a section of the summer on life support such was the state of their injury crisis, the reflection now is that flatline period might be to their favour.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe one thing that is probably standing to us is that players are fresh now because they were out for so long,\u201d surmised Jack.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur medical and S&C team make sure they get a lot of work into them on their way back from injuries and in a perverse way it is working for us because we think the players are now mad for road having missed so much of the season. If that is timing your run, I don\u2019t know what you would call it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

O\u2019Connor has spoken previously on where he believes their spate of 2026 injuries emanated from. On Monday, he went further. He labelled their earlier-in-the-season mass unavailability as \u201can absolute epidemic of injuries\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"Kerry\u2019sKerry\u2019s manager Jack O’Connor during the Tyrone win. Pic: James Crombie\/Inpho<\/p>\n

\u201cI keep going on about the amount of football that the boys are playing. It has to be something to do with it.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not doing anything extraordinary. We\u2019re not flogging the boys and haven\u2019t been for the last couple of years. It\u2019s a case of managing them. I\u2019ve thought this was going to be a massive problem from a long way back, especially with the split-season, and the lack of off-season for players. It\u2019s going to get progressively worse by the way because it becomes cumulative.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor a long time, I have said that Kerry can\u2019t continue to play three championships and expect inter-county players to play three championships. It is crazy. No one else is doing it and why do Kerry think they can do it and survive unscathed. It is not going to happen.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo I have the solution to it? I don\u2019t, but something is going to have to give somewhere. You are going to have to throw the National League or do something. You just can\u2019t continue to play championships into the end of November, give them four weeks off and then sail in during January and prepare for a National League three weeks (later), it doesn\u2019t work like that.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want this to turn into a moan, but it is something I have a real bee in my bonnet about. Something fairly substantial is going to have to change because it is not good practice what is going on.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

His plea is that November would be a match-free zone for Kerry players, outside of those involved with the county championship-winning junior, intermediate, and senior clubs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

His call is to the GPA to enforce their stance for that month to be a no-go zone for inter-county players.<\/p>\n

Back to the present. After three games in 14 days, the weekend free of knockout championship fare was a boon.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe all needed it because it\u2019s tough going when you\u2019re flat out every weekend. For a while there, you can\u2019t even enjoy one game, and you\u2019re into the next game.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very frenetic, and that takes it out of you. So it was great to get, I won\u2019t say a weekend off because we trained, but at least the boys had Sunday off, and you can get some bit of recuperation, mentally and physically.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It’s hard to argue with Jack O\u2019Connor\u2019s contention that Dublin have timed their run to perfection. Part of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":539027,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[177329,6937,2179,61,60,112],"class_list":["post-539026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-championship-2026","tag-kerry-gaa","tag-dublin-gaa","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539026\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/539027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}