Tom Humphrieson the burning question Kerry hope to answer when they start their latest three-in-a-row bid against old rivals - are they still hungry?

THE KINGDOM isn't buzzing with the sort of excitement you might expect while counting down to a showdown with Cork. There is a listlessness to the unfolding of the week and to a fixture which was once so high voltage as to require health warnings. Cork and Kerry are in danger of only half filling the bowl by the Lee.

And for Kerry the danger lies right there - if the apathy on either side of the Cork and Kerry border seeps on to the training pitch in Fitzgerald Stadium, Kerry will waddle out tomorrow afternoon as sitting ducks.

All that history teaches is we learn nothing from history and in Kerry they are making a conscious effort to remind themselves that Cork teams who play dead when they are still waking up with cold sweats about the previous years' defeats are often the most dangerous Cork teams of all.

And then there is the almost lost art of defending the All-Ireland championship. When Kerry humiliated Cork last September they became the first side to successfully defend since the Cork side of 1989/90. This year they become the first team to take a decent shot at the three in a row since Kerry concluded their lap of honour in 1986.

That All-Ireland final of 1986 when Tyrone missed a penalty and coughed up a handsome lead is a handsome example of the upside to being defending champions. You bring a little extra knowledge to the table.

"There is the confidence thing that you gain from winning the All-Ireland," says Jack O'Connor, whose two titles as Kerry manager had a losing season between them. "When a team is going through a tough patch you fall back on winning the year before."

The confidence you gain from that is huge. Last year in the Monaghan game it looked for large chunks like Monaghan would win, but Kerry hung in there. Great teams can do that. Go back to 1986, the last All-Ireland the great team won. That was an All-Ireland Tyrone had for the taking. Kerry hung in there and hung in there and kept playing.

"You will always get that period where the game is there for the taking if you keep doing what you believe in. There will always be an opportunity in the game to get back into it. If you have won the previous year you have more confidence when you see that chance."

Confidence. A certain aura that clings to winners? Residual fitness. Those are the pros. The cons are perhaps more numerous. Everybody is adapting to your style of play. You are staying the same. Everybody wants to beat you and spends the winter plotting your downfall. Hunger. How do you find it, whet it, use it?

This winter, Kerry holidayed in good style, as befitting a side who had retained the title. They spent time in Hawaii, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Three nights after they came home they convened on the back pitch in Fitzgerald Stadium. Reality kicked them in the gut.

Kieran Donaghy remembers the sensation. Having kept himself at a good level of fitness with his basketball career over the winter he had the luxury of being able to feel sorry for some of his friends.

"We had worked hard all year so we enjoyed our trip, the girlfriends and wives enjoyed it, the players enjoyed it, the county board fellas enjoyed it. We had a few training sessions before we left, but our first real session was that night three days after we got back.

"The smiles and the jokes and all the conversation before warm-up were great fun. After 10 minutes that was it. There wasn't a fella that talked for the rest of the training session. Back to the real world.

"It was good to get back in early and get the heads down, I suppose, but the back pitch in Fitzgerald Stadium is a depressing-enough spot. Three oul fellas, lights and a waterlogged pitch! That's the start of it. You don't think of last September or next September. There were fellas dying. "

Getting back to the training ground and working hard is a start, but the Gaelic football world changes constantly. All-Ireland champions are faced with the choice of change for the sake of change or deciding that if something ain't broke it doesn't need fixing.

With the exception of four esteemed colleagues, Mikey Sheehy played on more defending champions teams than anyone else in history. Year in and year out Kerry set out the following season as All-Ireland champions.

Things have changed.

"It's a different challenge for managers now," he says, "In our time, Micko played on us with our fear of losing. That is gone a little. They have the back door now and that knowledge is always there.

"It is a bit of a plus, especially for our lads. They will be hoping to win and come through the front door against Cork but they know it is there.

"When we played there was this kind of a hunger thing that Mick was able to stoke up. 'You will be long enough out of it when ye are done'. He made sure there was no guy coming off the field without giving the 110 per cent. We were terrified of losing to Cork.

"Sometimes out there you wondered were you training at all you would feel so bad. It is a big mental thing. It's harder for a manager now."

The teams Sheehy played on were subject to the relentless cajoling of perhaps the most idiosyncratic manager the game has seen. The very essence of Mick O'Dwyer's genius was not so much the gathering of a unique bunch of players, but wringing so much out of them, year in and year out. He fended off the staleness that sets in on champions with the carrot of ever more exotic holidays and the stick of every more drastic accounts of what defeat might feel like.

The teams he put out seldom varied and he never went through the business of bringing in four or five players just for the sake of freshening a squad through a transfusion of enthusiasm. Kerry in the 70s and 80s went through many seasons using just 17 or 18 players in an entire season. Usually the same 17 or 18 who had played the year before.

"Perhaps Micko was too loyal to some of us," says Sheehy, "but he knew how to get the hunger going in us again. He had every trick in the book. If he had needed that he would have used it!"

Tomorrow Kerry have four changes from the side that was out the last day. Two are enforced, but the panel has benefited frequently over the past few years from a regular intake of players and there is a perception that every player is just a break away from the starting 15.

Not many would have foreseen 12 months previously that Séamus Scanlon would be a starting All-Ireland midfielder or that Donnacha Walsh would come back from the wilderness to slip in just ahead of Darren O'Sullivan for tomorrow's game.

"You try to tweak things," says Jack O'Connor "The best way to guard against staleness is competition for places. Basically, if you have fellas worried about their place it fights off complacency.

"Of course, it can be a problem going year in and year out . . . people get tired of listening to the same thing. It is a challenge every year to try to tweak things and keep it fresh.

"The best place to look has been Kilkenny. They always have two or three new fellas in every year. It helps to bring in young fellas, the whole thing is new and they bring in a burst of enthusiasm. That brings a freshness around the place as well. If you hang on to fellas at the tail end of the panel they get to the stage where they just go through the motions. Number 30 can be the fella who is marking the star forward inside in training.

"That is the only way to keep fellas improving, if number 30 is raising the bar. So it is no harm for a winning panel to throw a fella in at the deep end every now and then. Give everyone the impression at least that they have a chance of playing. The fear of losing your place is a good thing."

O'Connor's last year in charge brought the 2006 All-Ireland title to the county. The use of Kieran Donaghy as a full forward in one fell swoop reversed the tactical trend of the previous few years and teams were searching desperately for their own Donaghys to whom quick, early ball could be pumped. With everybody changing to catch up, should Kerry have changed or merely refined their own system?

"A few teams tried to clone their own Donaghy with varying degrees of success; you are always refining the team, though.

"From Kerry's point of view there is only one Kieran Donaghy. At the end of the day if you play your A game it is very hard to counteract. The buzz phrase again now is getting bodies back, going back to what was in vogue a few years ago. If you have a good target man up front you can move the ball up there before the bodies get back there, though. You have to develop what you are good at."

In that respect Donaghy himself provided the answer to Kerry anxieties last year in that his game had entire dimensions added on to it and his influence now extends beyond that of the average skyscraping full forward.

"You can fall into

that trap of being predictable," says Donaghy. "The game plan we have works, but we have to keep it fresh and varied. We have the players to keep it varied. We can't go out and be the same Kerry team as last year. We could have been beaten twice last year and if we stand still we will be beaten twice this year.

"We need to pick it up 10 per cent everywhere to have a hope. We know what we have to do. We aren't looking past Sunday. It will be so tough. They will be severely hungry. We have to wonder will we have the same hunger as this Cork team and will we have changed our game enough to keep them under pressure."

Kerry's title defence, already rocked by the absences of Paul Galvin and Declan O'Sullivan, needs bolstering tomorrow.

Something about Cork is vital to Kerry's DNA, however, and one suspects that, in Cork, Kerry might find what they are looking for. Traction. Even if tomorrow's game has been lacking the anticipation a clash of gladiators should bring, Cork are Cork.

"We had a desperate fear of losing to Cork," says Sheehy, "the one game you really do not want to lose. We lost the 1982 All-Ireland final to Offaly when we were going for five in a row and then in 1983 we lost in Páirc Uí Chaoimh to Tadhg Murphy's goal. People say it wasn't as bad as in 1982. It wasn't a million miles off it coming out of Páirc Uí Chaoimh."

Donaghy would often meet Sheehy in Tralee. The talk is not of three in a row, but of the next game. That is the mantra. The next game is always your hardest. Back door or no back door, Cork always loom ominously.

"To be honest," says Donaghy, whose articulate leadership skills are an advertisement for the benefits of winning, "you don't know till you have a tough game. We will have a very tough one in Páirc Uí Chaoimh. After that, we will know what kind of stomach we have for it.

"The buzz around the camp is good. But you don't know, you don't really know till you are two points down in Páirc Uí Chaoimh with two minutes to go. Do you have the stomach to pull it back to get a draw or win out of it? I'll be better able to answer that question next weekend."

That's the beauty at the heart of tomorrow's low-key affair.