THE MIDDLE THIRD: Kerry may not be in a good place after being badly bullied by Cork but a few pints along with a bit of letting off steam and this could be a good loss for them

COMING OUT of Páirc Uí Chaoimh on Sunday, a lot of the conversations took a very similar tone. It wasn’t so much that people were wondering if we were after seeing the end of a great Kerry team, but more like people were beginning to accept it as a fact. If I heard one man saying, “Well, sure they’ve given us some great days”, I must have heard it from maybe a dozen or so.

It brought me back to a car journey home to west Kerry from Killarney in 1987. It was after the famous Munster final replay where Cork beat Kerry 0-13 to 1-5 and everyone could see it was inevitable that they were going to be a dominant force for a while.

I would have been about 12 at the time and I remember sitting in the back of the car and my father saying that this was the end of a fabulous era for Kerry football. The whole way home we were giving obituaries for this Kerry player or that Kerry player. “They owe us nothing,” he said.

There was a lot of that around on Sunday from Kerry people and you can see why. Kerry aren’t in a very good place at the moment and Jack O’Connor has been getting it in the neck down here over the past few days. But every time I heard somebody say, “Ah sure they owe us nothing at this stage,” I was secretly hoping that wherever the Kerry players were, somebody was saying the same thing to them. Not to make them feel better. To make them feel worse.

Nothing will annoy a group of proud players more than people telling them they’ve done enough. You think Colm Cooper wants to be told that and him only just gone 29? Or Declan O’Sullivan at 28? Even Marc and Tomás Ó Sé who are gone past 30 – they wouldn’t be still at it if they thought they had nothing more to offer.

I’d say the more those fellas hear people telling them they’ve been great servants, the bigger the reaction will be over the next few weeks.

Sunday was just a bad day all round. Kerry were bullied, both tactically and physically. In the tactical stakes, Conor Counihan targeted Marc Ó Sé by getting whoever he was marking to take him out to the corner and stop him affecting the game.

At different stages of the match, Colm O’Neill and Donncha O’Connor sacrificed their own involvement to keep Marc away from the action. Counihan made the Kerry defence play the game on Cork’s terms and the upshot was that O’Neill and O’Connor finished the game with 11 points between them, with Marc having to spend the whole afternoon well away from the square. It was a very simple tactic and it worked to a tee.

Cork came prepared, down to the very last detail. They had a man in a white jersey behind the goal and every time the ball went over or wide, he had a new ball rolled out in front of Alan Quirke for the kick-out even while the first one was still in the air. They were taking every edge they could, thinking ahead all the time. You have to admire them for that.

Physically, they pushed Kerry around, which was the most disappointing aspect of the whole day for me. No matter how bad things get, you should never accept getting pushed around by a Cork man. They wouldn’t accept it coming in the other direction.

Kerry lacked a hard edge and it gave Cork all the encouragement they needed. Cork could sense it and you could see them making sure the Kerry players knew they had them. They were mouthing and yapping away and you wouldn’t have to be a genius to work out what they were saying.

For that reason, I’d have to compliment Paul Galvin for his discipline throughout the game – I’m not sure I’d have been as well behaved. It’s hard to put up with that carry-on. If there’s belting to be done, then do the belting and get on with the game. All this mouthing is nothing more than a tactic to get a reaction, to get a fella sent off.

It’s a cheap part of the sport these days and while things were always said on the pitch, it was never a full-scale part of the tactics of a team. I was no angel on the pitch but I never tried to get anyone sent off. If a game is going to be a battle – especially a niggly one like Sunday’s was – then fine, let’s have a battle. But let’s be men about it.

And Cork have the men, no question there. They have size everywhere, with mobility and aggression to go along with it.

They have exceptional players all over the pitch, especially in the forwards. Ciarán Sheehan’s point from under the stand in the first half was brilliant, Paddy Kelly had a great game pulling the strings and O’Neill and O’Connor were excellent too. Their system of rotating their forwards around the place is very clever.

Cork were the better team, although I wouldn’t be getting too carried away with them just yet.

They weren’t impressive at all in defence and when a Kerry team which isn’t functioning properly can still create that many goal chances, Cork can’t be fully happy with how they’re organised back there.

They’ll be there or thereabouts in September but they’ve got flaws and Counihan will have plenty to work on.

As for Kerry, there are a few things to worry about. For one, I think they are set-up wrong tactically. The half-forward line that has been the source of some of Kerry’s best football over the past few years isn’t functioning.

Kerry have no outlet for ball coming out from defence because whatever way Kerry are playing Declan O’Sullivan and Paul Galvin are often out of position. If the likes of Peter Crowley and Eoin Brosnan are coming out with the ball, the team needs shape to give them an option. This is all small enough stuff though and Jack O’Connor can fix it easily enough as the summer goes on.

If anything, I would be a bit more worried about the body language of some of the players.

A defeat to Cork should be like a death in the family and I don’t know if those players were hurt enough by what happened.

There was a lack of drive at the end of the game and a poor enough reaction to some of the scores. Maybe they felt it just wasn’t their day when they couldn’t convert any of the goal chances but that’s not good enough.

Not for players of this quality.

This isn’t a time for obituaries, not when Kerry are able to call on players that other counties would snap up in a heartbeat. These guys have to work it out themselves. Maybe it calls for sitting in a room together and having a row, maybe it calls for just enjoying the road and embracing wherever these qualifiers bring them. Whatever they do, it will have started already.

They would have met up for a few pints on Monday and talked it out. There would have been different pockets of them in different corners, putting it all to rights. I’d say Jack’s ears were burning all day with whatever was being said about him. Not because he’s done anything especially wrong, just because that’s the way players talk about management after a big defeat.

I’d say it happens it every team in every sport the world over. You lose, you gather, you give about the manager, you get it out of your system.

Every team needs those days. I used to find that the further along we got in the day, the clearer everything would appear. By the fifth or sixth pint, everything would be fairly simple – it was all Jack’s fault and we were the best players Kerry ever saw. I think after a while he took to turning his phone off for fear of another 3am phonecall from Tom O’Sullivan.

Jack’s obituary is being written down here as well, which is unfair on the man. The Kerry job is a tough one no matter how well you’ve done in the past and it can’t have been easy for him the last couple of days knowing that every conversation in the county would have heard his name mentioned at some point.

Kerry people are hurting after Sunday. Whether you like it or not they always want more, they always want better. Mikey Sheehy told me one time about getting pulled up a few days after the 1980 All-Ireland final after Kerry beat Roscommon by three points. Mikey had scored Kerry’s only goal that day and it meant a third All-Ireland in a row.

And still, a fella pulled him up a couple of days after it and gave out to him for punching the goal instead of kicking it.

Imagine being the manager of the county team in a place like that. Even when you win, you just can’t win. So I have a certain amount of sympathy for Jack O’Connor this week. He’s a man who loves a challenge and if he turns this one around, it will be considered the best of all his All-Irelands. The challenge is big but the prize is bigger.

He will sit down with the video and work out his strategy from here. His players didn’t look like they were all on the same hymn sheet so that’s the first thing he needs to sort out. They didn’t look like they were hurting enough but that will have sorted itself out by the time they got back training.

Jack will need to work out how he’s going to use Kieran Donaghy because he’s just not as big a threat as he should be and he will need to find a way to get a better hold at midfield where I counted Aidan Walsh catching four balls without having to jump off his feet. Things like that aren’t good enough at this level.

In a way, the worst thing that could have happened to Kerry on Sunday was a win. They could have ambled along and not got their wake-up call before it was too late. Because of the quality of those players, they will always get over the Tipperarys and whoever else but until you’re put out of your misery by one of the real contenders, you might fool yourself into thinking things are okay.

Things aren’t okay. Now they have to focus and knuckle down.

If they do that, Kerry could look back on it in late September and see last Sunday as the best possible result.