Tony Leen

4 days ago | irishexaminer.com | Tony Leen

PRIOR to Saturday’s game against Cavan, victory from which pointed Kerry the way of Croke Park and a heavyweight quarter-final, football’s curious ingested (with relish) the revelations from Eamonn Fitzmaurice on these pages of previous football crises in the Kingdom. And who, more than anyone else, navigated the group away from the rocks. “The younger players worshipped him,” Fitzmaurice wrote of Declan O’Sullivan during Kerry’s 2014 campaign. “Declan challenged the group to the core.

6 days ago | irishexaminer.com | Tony Leen

IF it wasn’t quite Cape Town harbour Páidí and the ‘roughest f*cking animals’, it was nonetheless an unvarnished message to the Kerry faithful from manager Jack O’Connor. Get off our backs and get behind us. At around the same time that O’Connor was addressing the ‘difficult environment’ his players were operating in at Fitzgerald Stadium on Saturday, his talisman David Clifford was doing pitchside interviews extolling the virtue and advantage of a noisy Kerry support in Croke Park next weekend.

6 days ago | irishexaminer.com | Tony Leen

KERRY manager Jack O’Connor has admitted he feared that the suffocating pressure would get to some of his younger Kerry players as they recovered from last week’s Tullamore to book an All-Ireland quarter-final place with a win over Cavan. As man of the match David Clifford explicitly called for Kerry supporters to back their side in big numbers next week in Croke Park, O’Connor admitted that Fitzgerald Stadium on Saturday was a difficult environment for some of his players to express themselves.

6 days ago | irishexaminer.com | Tony Leen |Fitzgerald Stadium

IN THE midst of all the David Clifford artillery fire and the gloomy sight of stricken Kerry players, a moment in Killarney’s first half. Cavan were working possession clear of their back yard short of 10 minutes, oblivious to the thundering hooves of Sean O’Shea coming hard for a steal. Across he came from the blind side to deflect the ball in the direction of Joe O’Connor.

1 week ago | irishexaminer.com | Tony Leen

Well, there's your Kerry gut check – a blow to the solar plexus that left a bemused Jack O’Connor and his dazed players with more questions than answers, more self-doubts than is healthy for any side bracing itself for the summer’s sleep climbs. But the big surprise of the weekend’s All-Ireland SFC group games has to be more about Meath and Robbie Brennan than the side they out-matched in all the key benchmarks in Tullamore’s O’Connor Park.