KERRY FOOTBALL RETIREMENT OF DARRAGH Ó SÉ:Beneath Ó Sé's easy going surface there is a doggedness and a will which equipped him well for the long haul, writes TOM HUMPHRIES

THIS MORNING in the coffee shop of a hotel in Tralee Darragh Ó Sé will most likely be found for a while in the company of Mikey Sheehy and a handful of All-Ireland medallists from various eras of Kerry’s footballing past. They’ll be sipping tea or coffee, crumbling scones for the buttering and happily cutting each other to pieces with blades and shafts of wit. Ó Sé will get a special going over as his companions trawl through his obituaries looking for material.

It’s a college of serious football talk where nobody takes themselves seriously. If you wanted an example of what makes Kerry football different from football just about anywhere else an hour of earwigging would suffice. Wearing a Kerry jersey or having enough medals to give as gifts to everyone of your close family guarantees you no celebrity in Kerry. You take your football seriously. Yourself not seriously at all. And you will be fine.

If you had to bet you would say they will start the dismantling of Ó Sé this morning with the business of there having been any announcement at all. Somebody will glance up from a paper and say ‘Hey, Darragh, it says here you are retiring. Yerra, I thought you were gone years ago’.

And Darragh will laugh. Perhaps one of the most surprising things about Darragh Ó Sé’s surprising career is he actually announced it had all come to an end. He joked often that he would retire whenever his friend Maurice Fitzgerald retired. Maurice is long gone but not officially retired. Darragh has beaten him to the punch just when it seemed possible that he might have enough fuel in the tank and enough sense of his own capacity to hang on forever, making briefer but ever more influential appearances every year.

Darragh Ó Sé has always been about surprise, though. Small for a modern midfielder and burdened by having an uncle from whose shadow it would seem impossible to emerge, there was very little excitement about his championship debut back in 1994.

The emergence of what looked like a moderate midfielder, albeit one with a famous name wasn’t something which instantly suggested the end of famine in Kerry back then.

Beneath Ó Sé’s easy-going surface, however, there is a doggedness and a will which equipped him well for the long haul. His 15-year career would make him one of those icons for whom the Christian name is sufficient for recognition, bring him an unlikely haul of six All-Ireland medals, and leave him with a reputation that makes him head and shoulders the best midfielder since Jack O’Shea or Brian Mullins roamed the land.

He achieved all that in a game which had become increasingly attritional as the years went past. He achieved it while appearing to whistle a happy tune as he worked. There was always time to smell the roses and have the fun.

The good days were too many to enumerate. Easier to skip a stone over the bad ones. The All-Ireland club final of 2004 when Gaeltacht succumbed to Caltra with Darragh as captain was a day which hurt him deeply.

He has always played for club and county with a deep and respectful sense of where he is from. That would have been a day of days.

That March afternoon, an All-Ireland carelessly lost to Armagh in 2002, a humiliation at the hands of Meath in 2001 and the small sheaf of failures to Tyrone, those would be the bad days and even they did little to subtract from the fun he got from it all. Horses fun, as his friend Mikey Sheehy would often say.

He was old school. As a succession of managers tended to the Kerry team through the appliance of science, Darragh clung to the belief that the green and gold jersey was sufficient motivation for anybody and the sight of the green and gold jersey in full flight just “upped the dosage” for any opposition side. The scientific exploration would continue and Darragh would happily set about breaking the “carraigs” of the manager concerned.

That confident sense of difference created a useful energy in its own way. On training nights in Killarney the Irish speaking players and those close to them created the nucleus to the team and drove the others on with a mix of goading and encouragement.

“You have to believe you will start,” he said of last summer when his slow return to county action after the league led most to believe that he wouldn’t be starting.

“Training is no good unless you believe that. The same as the fellas I compete with for the place. They have to believe they will start. And that makes for good football. For aggressiveness and physical play and that brings the team on.

“There is a bond there. You know you wouldn’t be where you are but for those players who push you on. There is a fierce competitiveness there between you as individuals but at the same time there is a bond because you know that by competing as hard as you can with each other you make the team better.”

That has been the philosophy which has driven Darragh Ó Sé on through the thick and the thin, seen him outlast famine and controversy and a succession of midfield partners.

Took the lumps, gave the lumps and walks away with an All-Ireland medal still warm in his pocket.

The end of an era. He wouldn’t let that be said though.

“Listen, they won’t be retiring the jersey. It’s there for the next fella.”