Tom Humphries talks to the leader of Kerry's 1975 vintage, who helped kickstart a golden era but was denied every captain's prerogative.

It was 30 years ago today. Mick O'Dwyer taught the boys to play. They'd been going in and out of style. . . etc, etc. Thirty years? Since the lean kids from Kerry came to Dublin on that greasy day and set up the greatest era in football? Thirty years since the headless captain? Thirty years since Mickey Ned O'Sullivan soloed too far for his own good and wound up in hospital. Nah.

A couple of weeks back they had an Iron Man contest in Kenmare. Mickey Ned O'Sullivan had been eyeing it all year. In January he'd rung two friends, asked would they take a leg each. Sure, they said.

One pal, he'd been for two or three runs in 20 years. He was being asked to do 13 and a half miles up the mountains. I will.

The other has had his hips replaced. He was being asked to cycle 62 miles up hill and down dale. Sure it'll give me something to work towards, he said.

And Mickey Ned went off to Calcutta for the summer to work with street kids. While he was there he thought of his two friends and texted for news of their progress.

John O'Keeffe had three months of heavy bike training done. He texted Ogie Moran to see how the running was going.

One word came back. "Bolloxed!"

But on the day, Mickey did the swim. Half-seven in the morning, two kilometres out across Kenmare Bay. Johnno did the bike stint: 62 miles over the mountains in a young man's time. Ogie finished very well, running within himself as others floundered.

Thirty years? Not when you're special.

Ah, 1975 and all that. As the hopeful spring of that year swelled into summer Mickey Ned O'Sullivan began to think the autumn would be coloured differently from any other he'd known.

O'Sullivan had been around Kerry teams for a few years playing in mongrel outfits made up half of greybeard legends and half of golden boys. They could win the league in their sleep. Come championship time they were fodder.

In 1973 they went to the old Athletic Grounds in Cork. Their dressingroom for that Munster final was a stable in the adjacent Showgrounds. They sat around on the straw and finally got togged out. They emerged and hopped the ditch to get into the ground. Cork stuck five goals past them and they came in for half-time.

Paudie O'Donoghue the full back lit up his customary half-time cigarette. If Paudie could have taken a smoke during the game he would have. They sat around with the Munster final already lost and spent the time cautioning Paudie not to set the straw on fire. Eventually four or five lads lit up cigarettes.

Johnny Culloty was in charge back then and had a hard road to travel. He'd played with many of the lads and of course he was a little easygoing with them. Culloty had an understanding of football which was and is virtually unrivalled. Just the old lags knew him too well.

Mickey Ned O'Sullivan by then was making his way in the Green and Gold and served as a curiosity to the older generation. He was one of the first intake of Irish students to Strawberry Hill College in London, where he was studying physical education.

He remembers coming back in 1971 when he was a moon-blond teenager home for the summer with his head full of ideas.

Kerry were training in Killarney and the great Jackie Lyne was doing the training. The car journey into Killarney was shared most evenings with Mick O'Dwyer, Mick O'Connell and Johnny Culloty. So much greatness in one car that there was scarcely room for the spare tyro.

"They were travelling with me in and out and we'd do the training and the three of them would be very interested in training. I would have been the first to go off and study physical education, so they were very interested but they wouldn't let on they were interested. It was that Kerry way of trying to find out something without asking but all the time they'd have been wondering was there anything in it that would make them even better footballers."

So they'd hop the ball for him.

"We had a training session one evening and Johnny said to me after training - Well, Mickey Ned, what did you think? They'd be setting me up but I was naive enough to go for it. In hindsight I know I was being set up."

- Well, Mickey Ned, what did you think?

- Yerra, Johnny, 'twas alright. We'd no warmup though.

Of course this stirred it. Nudges. Swapped looks. He ploughed on.

- We'd no stretches. We'd no warmdown.

O'Dwyer drew him out further. Warming up. Why would we warm up on a night like that and why would we warm down then? So Mickey Ned gave a short extempore talk on lactic acid. It seemed to go over well. His audience of legends nodded gravely. He'd expected them to be cynical about this whippersnapper just back from the Smoke with the hatful of half-baked ideas.

He was pleased and for a while afterwards sometimes when he'd be passing he'd hear them talking quietly among themselves about lactic acid. He wondered if a supplementary talk on hamstrings might be useful.

"And then after a while I realised that was what they'd christened me. Here comes Lactic Acid. I was known to them as Lactic Acid."

When the great Kerry footballing revolution started though, Strawberry Hill was to have its influences and Lactic Acid was to have his day. Well, part of his day.

It's strange to note that despite the disparity in the amounts of silverware they bring to the table when the Dublin and Kerry teams of the 1970s get together it is the Kerrymen who are a little envious.

Back in 1975 Kerry were young. So young that they won an All-Ireland with hardly a thought. They'd win seven more and without appreciating it at the time many of the Kerry team crossed the step into an adulthood bathed always in the warm and flattering light of celebrity.

"To get to the standard they got to," says Mickey Ned, "it had to be all-consuming. There was room for nothing else. Dublin were a little fortunate. They were more mature when they came to it in 1974. Some of the Kerry lads were only 18 and 19 and they knew no other life subsequent to the win in 1975. It was more difficult for some of them to leave it behind. Hero to zero. The transition was more difficult for some of our lads. They were less mature. Younger. They had been big fish in a small pond all their adult lives."

Mickey Ned was spared the worst ravages by sheer circumstance. When he broke through onto the Kerry side in the early 70s he might have gathered some celebrity around his native Kenmare but by then he was studying in London, living in a flat in Teddington with a clatter of English fellows who knew little and cared less about what Mickey Ned did on his Sunday afternoons back in Ireland.

Strawberry Hill accepted an intake of young Irishmen who nourished themselves on new ideas and experimented wildly while away from an Ireland still bogged down in the tittle-tattle politics of the Ban.

Mickey Ned played rugby. He was green and he was keen so he went down to the rugby club. There was a big gnarly London Welsh guy who looked him over and said, "You've no neck - you'll be a good prop."

Mickey Ned established that a prop played among the forwards and decided he would therefore have ample opportunity to demonstrate his scoring prowess. Happily he signed up.

"So I ended up in the scrum. I knew nothing. Playing against guys who'd been at it all their lives. I couldn't believe it was a game at all. I escaped and I played full back then after a while. Jimmy Deenihan was a flanker on the team. Jimmy would hit anything. I played four years and the old physical contact was good and the fitness. It toughened us up."

Not enough for the 1975 final but meanwhile there was soccer. He went out for soccer with Kevin Kehilly of Cork. They announced they would be full backs. Mobile and fit, scorching down the wings. Of course they'd be full backs.

"We'd no idea about offside though. We were playing against Chelsea reserves. We'd have been comfortable on the ball but we didn't know what we were at. We were beaten nine-nil. Dave Sexton was in charge of Chelsea back then. He'd come to watch. I reckoned he was impressed with his boys. That was my last game."

The interest grew however.

"Soccer had a major influence on me. I went down to Arsenal to do an FA coaching course. Bertie Mee was in charge. Don Revie was there. You'd get to talk to these guys in coaching courses. You'd get ideas. I remember sitting down one time after two years in Strawberry Hill and I'd done the FA coaching course and it dawned on me. Christ, it's the same principles of play. Penetration, depth, balance. We've just never given names to these things."

He was playing under-21 football with Kerry that summer. Johnny Walsh was running the team and by then was in his 70s and secure enough in his knowledge of football to accede when Mickey Ned, the team captain, asked if he might take a session.

"I had these ideas from soccer. On the field that night you had Mikey Sheehy, John Egan, Powery, all in the forwards. Lads you didn't have to tell anything to, and Johnny Walsh was a man who had the confidence to say, show me what you can do.

"The lads picked it up straight away. We had beaten Cork in Munster at that stage. We galloped the semi. Won the All-Ireland. I maintain it was the beginning of Kerry's modern type of football. Mikey had played soccer. All the lads had played soccer. They just applied the same principles."

It backfired later of course. At under-21 level the boys were smart enough and quick enough to literally walk the ball into the net on occasions. Mickey Ned got the seniors playing the same way and one evening when the new style was demonstrated to him Paudie O'Donoghue the old full back shook his head and said, you'll get crucified, Mickey Ned. Paudie O'Donoghue was a full back. He knew.

By 1975 Kenmare were the county champions and Mickey Ned was top of the queue for the captaincy. If there was one fly in the ointment it was that he was increasingly being entrusted with the training of the team. Given the choice he wanted the captaincy not the bootroom.

"Funny thing. I was asked to train the team after Easter in 75. I had no intentions of it. I wanted to be captain. I knew I would be captain if I was playing. The county board were sending me to Gormanston for a coaching course run by Kevin Heffernan and Joe Lennon."

Dublin had won the All-Ireland from nowhere the year before playing a new type of football and O'Sullivan recognised the challenge was one the young Kerry team could meet. So he rang Mick O'Dwyer to see would he come along. And?

"O'Dwyer says, 'No, I wouldn't go there at all'. Joe Lennon had said Kerry football was 10 years out of date. There was still offence taken at that."

Eventually though O'Dwyer came round and asked despite himself what was involved.

"We do a course and there's an exam at the end."

"Well, I'm not going then," said O'Dwyer.

"Why?"

"I've no intention of doing any exam."

"Well," said Mickey Ned, "we'll do no exam. We'll see what's happening. The minute it's over we'll do no exam, we'll just slip away."

And O'Dwyer was on the hook.

"I remember Kevin Heffernan gave a coaching session, a physical-training session, and it was amazing. Real hard, physical stuff. We were coming away and O'Dwyer says to me the first team that'll beat Dublin they'll have to be fitter than them."

On the way down in the car Mickey Ned starting chipping at O'Dwyer the way O'Dwyer would do with so many charges over the next 12 years: "Any chance you'd train the team, Mick?" "No. Too busy."

"I knew by then of course that I could be captain. We had great regard for Mick as we had all played with him for four years even though he was of a previous generation. Even during that time he had been a selector while he was playing. He had great respect from us. I said again, 'Will you train the team?' He said, 'Not a hope'."

But Gormanston to Kenmare is a five-hour journey and when Mickey Ned got out of the car he knew he had his man. He went inside and rang the county chairman, Ger McKenna, who hopped into his own car and drove the 70 miles to Waterville to O'Dywer's house. The deal was done before O'Dwyer had time for second thoughts.

"The first night at training," says Mickey Ned, "I made out a rough session for him. He took it. It was the only time he ever consulted. He did the session with us. He came to me and said what did you think of it. I said it wasn't half hard enough really. I had become obsessed at that stage. It was the only chance there'd be of captaining a team to an All-Ireland.

"The next night he crucified us. He never asked me again. We had the same basic training for the next 10 or 12 years. He had enough cop-on to take control and did it his own way. Take it or lump it."

He ran them into the ground and he altered Mickey Ned's passing style, having seen Kerry run into a lot of walls in that year's league semi-final against Meath.

"Dwyer came in then and made us kick it. That made the difference. He made you kick the ball long. Same spaces but quick release. Nothing changed after that."

Almost unknown to himself O'Dwyer's intense application and ability to discipline players and the training he put them through made his young team incredibly focused.

He was cute too of course.

"He had an innate cuteness which came to a certain level. It wouldn't be rational - it was passionate and a gut feeling. He knew Spillane needed a bit of media and he could handle him. And Paudie Lynch, say, was quiet, a players' player, a craftsman. No fuss. Same with John Egan. Ogie would be buzzing. Brendan Lynch would be quiet but he had fierce fire. No geeing up needed. Powery had the same. John Egan needed a bit of a stir. This was how Mick would look at it. Basic but his finger was on the pulse."

He gave Mickey Ned a lot of responsibility that summer. Partly because they'd played together and probably because at that time O'Sullivan knew more about training teams than O'Dwyer did.

"He would leave me take charge in the dressingroom and do the pep talk. When I left the captaincy he never left anyone else do it after that, apart from Páidí in 1978. He grew in confidence with success."

And there would be plenty of that.

Mickey Ned remembers nothing of the All-Ireland final weekend of 1975. Not even where the team stayed. He remembers waking up in the Richmond Hospital at nine o'clock that night having drifted in and out of consciousness for some hours.

The nurse looked at him and told him Kerry had won and he recalls the news put an end to a nagging but not unpleasant thought in his head that the game was still going on and he might be going back on to play.

Kerry's win sparked an era that would change the GAA forever and Mickey Ned O'Sullivan, whose quiet philosophies went into so much of it, lasted just 17 minutes. If you've seen the incident any time in the last 30 years you won't need a description. If not let's just say Mickey Ned O'Sullivan was a good deal smaller than either Seán Doherty or Alan Larkin of Dublin and when he was propelled by one into the high arm of the other it looked as if his head would come off his shoulders.

He lay on the wet Croke Park turf. One other memory swims up through the years. Lying there, the sky fading to black and the voices over his head saying stand back, stand back, he could feel himself struggling to breathe. Then the lights and sound went out altogether.

Kerry went on and finished the job they had started with John Egan's third-minute goal. Pat Spillane, just 19 and from down the road in Templenoe, lifted the cup instead.

"I've no regret," says Mickey Ned. "Yerra, you have to be philosophical. It didn't happen. I was disappointed to miss the end of the game. When I was in and out of it I still thought the game was on. I came round and there was no game. A complete anti-climax but I got out the next day. That's life."

Life but less ordinary. It was an odd way to finish an unusual summer. O'Sullivan's relationship with O'Dwyer was such that on the evening of the semi-final win against Sligo the older man didn't demur when Mickey Ned announced he was going away on holidays for a month.

"The morning after the semi-final I wentaway on holidays for four weeks. I drove across Europe with another guy, Donnacha Lucey, who was teaching me. I just went and said listen, I'll be away for a month, and Mick said grand. I trained every day twice a day. I became obsessive on holidays because I felt I was losing training. Donnacha had no interest in football. Every place we went I'd find a small field. Up in the Alps. In the Black Forest. Up the Dolomites. In the Moselle valley. Training on little fields. No football. Just running."

He came back for the start of the school year. Controversy! PJ McIntyre, the Kenmare club secretary who'd started so many local kids playing football, was put off in a club match. The club felt McIntyre had been unfairly penalised. They sulked.

"There was a collection the week before the All-Ireland for the Kerry training fund. Church gate. The club decided there was no collection. I went over and I stood at all the Masses myself. I was persona non grata for a while. I felt that it wasn't relevant. I wasn't the flavour of the month.

"The buckets filled anyway. The people didn't understand the politics. There was a local guy captain. People were willing to contribute. In a small town there's always a little bit of stuff. Luckily nobody knew about the holiday."

Thirty years later what went around has come around. Last weekend, at a benefit for the club that wouldn't collect at the church gates, Mickey Ned got to do what he had been denied in 1975 - he got to lift the Sam, he got to speak.

His guests were the Dubs. His friendships with the old enemies, especially with Seán Doherty, had been instrumental in bringing 800 people together for a night with legends.

"A speech," he said when asked if he had one to give. "I've had it ready for 30 years."