Marc interview, recommended as usual!
Dec 20, 2014 4:16:38 GMT
glengael and Annascaultilidie like this
Post by Ballyfireside on Dec 20, 2014 4:16:38 GMT
This is a good read and happy xMas all. Only yesterday we were hoping against the odds for No 37, now 38 looks so exciting, as a fifty something I never looked forward so much, Gooch and Tommy probably have something to do with it, I often tell those of us living in Kerry that they don't appreciate just how different Kerry are, now I am guilty of the same charge, I never fully appreciated Gooch, Tommy or Marc until they were not playing.
And a v happy new year, a 38th happy new year, and ta for the music in '14, this is a great forum and I don't know what I'd do without it!
'It's very hard to walk away especially with the likes of Gooch and Tommy Walsh coming back'
Having overcome the brief trauma of exclusion, Marc O Se hopes to follow one of the comeback stories of 2014 by holding his place for yet another glory chapter with the Kingdom.
Yes, Marc O Se had the option of retirement, but sometimes it feels as if he might not breathe without the white heat of life as a Kerry footballer. So however black the portents, there is still just too much of an emotional pull. Two weeks after the All-Ireland final, he slipped on a wet stairs, fracturing his coccyx. A scan last week confirmed the injury has yet to heal. So winter's blackness closes in, carrying no promises.
For now, then, he cannot jog or even swim. He will be 35 in April and, when you get to that age in inter-county action, you come to feel a bit of a curiosity. Last season in training, O Se routinely found himself toe-to-toe with the young Killarney flier, Conor Keane, a gaping 15 years between them.
So he feels impatient to be doing the ground-work for 2015 now, yearning to run on the beach or simply play some five-a-side. But he is forbidden.
"I'm definitely frustrated" he agrees. "The injury is just something I'm going to have to mind. It's very slow to heal because, a bit like a cut on your hand, it's something that's moving all the time.
"I'd normally be someone who's always doing something in the off-season, just to keep the fitness levels up. So this is something I'm not used to. I'm kind of going into unknown territory and I'm no spring chicken."
He has decided to skip the January team holiday in the hope of depositing some early lodgements in the fitness bank whilst the All-Ireland champions warm their bones under a South African sun.
He was there before in 2002 when his uncle, Paidi, delivered that infamous interview about Kerry's "animals".
"Kind of thing of been there, done that" he smiles.
So Marc O Se will go again next season. Why? Because if there's one thing more terrifying than life on this speeding carousel, it is the thought of stepping off. When he got the injury, it almost seemed a signal from on high that the time was right to walk. He had, after all, been dropped last August for the All-Ireland semi-final replay against Mayo in Limerick. The angles were growing narrower.
But to take the plunge?
"If I'm honest, I could feel the hunger go for a while when I got this injury" he says. "I remember thinking to myself 'What am I going to do with myself now?' Playing for Kerry is a way of life to me. Has been since I went in making up the numbers for Paidi in 2000, a great, great experience marking the likes of Mike Frank Russell who won an Allstar that year.
"From that year on, you could say I've always been involved with Kerry. You train your body for it. Your whole life is shaped around it and I honestly don't know what I can do after football. Golf and all these things are options but, at the moment, I just couldn't see myself away from the team.
"It defines who I am nearly."
He went out that day for a bag of coal and came home without one.
When Eamonn Fitzmaurice rang to say they were going to "rest" him for the game in Limerick, the outside world became a blur to O Se. He had just pulled into Jimmy O'Shea's Texaco garage in Blennerville.
Jimmy is one of life's characters and when Marc would call in for diesel the following week, O'Shea had just one question. "How many tickets do the subs get for an All-Ireland final?" In this place you leave your ego at the door.
Still, the Wednesday between the two Mayo games held no laughter. O Se admits he was "kind of dumb-founded" by the call. As a family, Marc and his brothers would always be considered "tight" with Fitzmaurice. But they know him too to be his own man and, in this instance, he was showing it.
The pair of them chatted "for ages", basically agreeing to disagree. It wasn't a heated exchange, simply two old friends pulling different ways.
"I was taken aback really" Marc remembers now. "I said to him 'Look Eamonn, I disagree with this decision.' I thought I did a lot of good things in the drawn game. I felt it was kind of un-warranted.
"To be fair to him, he was saying 'We might well be getting this wrong but as a management we've decided to do this..' There's nothing you can do then. Ultimately you're just a team-member, you're not above it. And you've to act accordingly.
"My brother, Tomas, made number five his own for years, but he went last year. Then the jersey was taken by Paul Murphy who gets Man of the Match in the All-Ireland final!
"Playing with Kerry, you're only passing through."
Naturally, he rang both Tomas and Darragh that evening for some wise counsel. Both delivered the same, essential echo. "Suck it up Marc, suck it up!"
He did too, but it was hard.
Fitzmaurice wanted the decision kept "in-house", Kerry naming an unchanged team for the replay. "I suppose you need to be a bit steely-tough for it" reflects O Se now. "It takes a bigger man I suppose to be dropped and hold his counsel. But I had to look at the bigger picture of team. And there's a fierce team ethic about the set-up since Eamonn took over. I'd bought into that ethic myself, so couldn't be slipping out of it now.
"But I was very nervous before that replay. I was fretting over little things. Like will I wear my track-suit out there or will I just go out in togs and jersey? I felt I had to concentrate on all the positions in the back line because I could be coming on at any stage.
"You're doing your warm-up along the sideline, doing stretches and there's somebody behind you shouting 'Sit down!' They can't see the game. Some animal behind me! (laughing). You just feel out of place."
Peter Crowley went down with an early injury so O Se was sent sprinting down the line. Crowley recovered. Then, in the 22nd minute, management decided to make a change, O Se going on in place of Shane Enright.
Cue momentary panic. "Couldn't find my gum-shield" he chuckles now. "Lost it in the dug-out. So I'm out on the field without one and referees have given yellow cards for that before. I was just a ball of nerves."
An early gallop down the wing, settled his stomach. But this was still unknown territory.
He'd been asking Declan O'Sullivan about the dynamics of it, of stepping essentially cold into the cauldron of a Championship bear-pit. O'Sullivan's is one of those voices that people want to listen to. A marquee forward all his career, he was now recalibrating to the life of a substitute.
O'Sullivan's view was that it was harder to influence a game off the bench, that getting to the pace of it in mid-stream presented a different challenge. "Probably shouldn't have spoken to him at all" O Se laughs now.
"Because what he was saying was making me more nervous."
It is history now that Kerry won in extra-time and that the youngest of the O Se brothers played a stormer for 58 of the 80 minutes. History too that he then held his place for the final against Donegal.
"Without doubt, that replay was the best game I was ever involved in" O Se reflects now. "I'd even go so far as to say it was the highlight of my career. Just as regards the pure intensity of it, the delight when it was over.
"I'll always remember the Mayo goalkeeper lining up that free at the end of normal time. You're standing there, thinking 'Is this it? Are we gone now?'"
In the dressing-room after, O Se and Fitzmaurice met in a great, warm bear-hug. "Jesus you're one stubborn man" smiled Fitzmaurice.
"Takes one to know one" grinned O Se.
The cloud proved slow to clear on their year and the reasons for pessimism stockpiled.
Tomas had been just one of three high-profile retirees alongside Paul Galvin and Eoin Brosnan. Then there was the season-wrecking injury to 'Gooch'. When Cork arrived in Tralee on April 6 for a National League game that ended in the Kingdom's heaviest fall to their neighbours since the 1990 Munster final, Fitzmaurice's plans seemed in tatters.
O Se was hauled ashore midway through the second-half of that ten point shelling, recalling it as "an awful day". He reflects "It was just a terrible performance by the team. I remember questioning myself after. I was just finding it impossible to influence the game in any way. I had no qualms with Eamonn taking me off, because I wasn't up to it that day. I genuinely wasn't up to it.
"But I remember we had a team-meeting afterwards and Eamonn was so calm. His message was that we'd turn things round, that there was no need for panic. We went away shortly after that for a training week in Portugal and you could feel things coming together.
"It just showed that the season is a marathon, not a sprint. When you think of it, Kieran Donaghy was nowhere at the time. David Moran was nowhere. Yet these two fellas were our most influential players come the All-Ireland semi-final and final."
Having defeated Mayo, they shared the popular assumption that Dublin would be their final opponents. O Se was driving to Santry with Darran O'Sullivan and Stephen O'Brien the day of the second semi-final, following the game through radio commentary.
As each Donegal goal was intercepted by a great peal of northern thunder, they felt themselves become re-acquainted with a familiar challenge.
In Marc O Se's career with Kerry, their relationship with Ulster football has - at times - been an uncomfortable one. Most painfully, they lost to Tyrone in the Championships of '03, '05 and '08. And when, finally, getting the better of Mickey Harte's team in 2012, they were promptly beaten next time out by Donegal. They also lost to Down in 2010 and, for O'Se, the most painful memory of all, the '02 All-Ireland final loss to Armagh.
Why?
Perhaps because it was his first proper year as an inter-county footballer and, looking back, he had so much still to learn. "That final is one of my biggest regrets now" he says bluntly. "I was eleven stone that day and I suppose I was giving Diarmuid Marsden, a great footballer, four stone. I would have been marking Gooch in a lot of sessions leading up to that final whereas I suppose if I'd been put on the likes of Johnny Crowley, someone a bit more physical, I might have been better prepared. Ten years later, I was thirteen three or thirteen four.
"The old story I suppose. If I knew then what I know now…."
So Donegal loomed again, an aura of almost robotic efficiency restored under Jim McGuinness. Had they got Kerry spooked?
"No" he says flatly. "On our day, we'd feel we could beat anyone. Do you know, even at the start of the year, with all the retirements, Gooch's injury and all the rest, I remember still thinking we could win the All-Ireland."
He has a photograph in his phone of Tralee's Denny Street the night of the homecoming, an impossibly large throng captured in gorgeous autumn sunlight.
In the end, the season held a kind of perfection for Kerry. The old, neglected gentry of the south re-asserting themselves on a game they were being told had left them behind.
He thought a lot about his late father, Micheal, the week of the final. He thought a lot about Paidi too. Last Saturday, they had a Mass in Ventry for the second anniversary of Paidi's death. He would have been a grandfather now, daughter Neasa having recently given birth to a baby girl.
The gathering was lovely and intimate and awash with stories that have been recycled a million times.
"The man was lawless, liable to do anything" Marc chuckles. "In a roguish way, of course. You know I watched a lovely YouTube clip of him the other night, a seven-minute tribute. And you're sitting there thinking 'Where have those two years gone?'
"I'd have loved to have been able to tap into Paidi's experience this year. You know he got dropped himself in '88 and I know he didn't speak to Mick O'Dwyer for a few years after that happened. That was never going to happen between me and Eamonn, but I'd love to have been able to chat to Paidi about it."
The future will find its own path now.
O Se's injury meant he was lost to his club, Gaeltacht, as well as to West Kerry this year. That galled him. For Gaeltacht, especially, times have been difficult. They recently had to overcome Keel in a relegation play-off simply to retain Division Three status in Kerry. For a club that got to an All-Ireland final under the management of Marc's eldest brother, Feargal, in '04, the fall from grace has been shuddering.
SHUDDERING
But O Se was involved this year with Dara O Cinneide and Tomas O Muircheartaigh over an under-21 team that won this year's county title. Ten of that team are already playing senior.
"It's been a roller-coaster for our club, but these young fellas coming through are definitely the future" he says.
And Kerry?
"I don't want to let go" he says. "I hope I'm not being a bit blind, but I don't think I am. I think there's definitely more left in the tank. I certainly don't see myself having any God-given right to be on the team next year, but that's my intention. To be on it.
"It's very hard to walk away, especially with the likes of Gooch and Tommy (Walsh) coming back. Sure it's like you've two new signings there straight away, even two potential 'Footballers of the Year'.
"Then you've Darran (O'Sullivan) who just didn't get a free run at it this year and you've the young lads who now have the confidence of winning. I did think about walking away from it, I suppose especially with the year that I had. On one level, it might have been the perfect way to sign off.
"But I couldn't do it. I still feel I have the hunger. I might be on the team next year, I mightn't be. But I'm not going back in to make up numbers."
And a v happy new year, a 38th happy new year, and ta for the music in '14, this is a great forum and I don't know what I'd do without it!
'It's very hard to walk away especially with the likes of Gooch and Tommy Walsh coming back'
Having overcome the brief trauma of exclusion, Marc O Se hopes to follow one of the comeback stories of 2014 by holding his place for yet another glory chapter with the Kingdom.
Yes, Marc O Se had the option of retirement, but sometimes it feels as if he might not breathe without the white heat of life as a Kerry footballer. So however black the portents, there is still just too much of an emotional pull. Two weeks after the All-Ireland final, he slipped on a wet stairs, fracturing his coccyx. A scan last week confirmed the injury has yet to heal. So winter's blackness closes in, carrying no promises.
For now, then, he cannot jog or even swim. He will be 35 in April and, when you get to that age in inter-county action, you come to feel a bit of a curiosity. Last season in training, O Se routinely found himself toe-to-toe with the young Killarney flier, Conor Keane, a gaping 15 years between them.
So he feels impatient to be doing the ground-work for 2015 now, yearning to run on the beach or simply play some five-a-side. But he is forbidden.
"I'm definitely frustrated" he agrees. "The injury is just something I'm going to have to mind. It's very slow to heal because, a bit like a cut on your hand, it's something that's moving all the time.
"I'd normally be someone who's always doing something in the off-season, just to keep the fitness levels up. So this is something I'm not used to. I'm kind of going into unknown territory and I'm no spring chicken."
He has decided to skip the January team holiday in the hope of depositing some early lodgements in the fitness bank whilst the All-Ireland champions warm their bones under a South African sun.
He was there before in 2002 when his uncle, Paidi, delivered that infamous interview about Kerry's "animals".
"Kind of thing of been there, done that" he smiles.
So Marc O Se will go again next season. Why? Because if there's one thing more terrifying than life on this speeding carousel, it is the thought of stepping off. When he got the injury, it almost seemed a signal from on high that the time was right to walk. He had, after all, been dropped last August for the All-Ireland semi-final replay against Mayo in Limerick. The angles were growing narrower.
But to take the plunge?
"If I'm honest, I could feel the hunger go for a while when I got this injury" he says. "I remember thinking to myself 'What am I going to do with myself now?' Playing for Kerry is a way of life to me. Has been since I went in making up the numbers for Paidi in 2000, a great, great experience marking the likes of Mike Frank Russell who won an Allstar that year.
"From that year on, you could say I've always been involved with Kerry. You train your body for it. Your whole life is shaped around it and I honestly don't know what I can do after football. Golf and all these things are options but, at the moment, I just couldn't see myself away from the team.
"It defines who I am nearly."
He went out that day for a bag of coal and came home without one.
When Eamonn Fitzmaurice rang to say they were going to "rest" him for the game in Limerick, the outside world became a blur to O Se. He had just pulled into Jimmy O'Shea's Texaco garage in Blennerville.
Jimmy is one of life's characters and when Marc would call in for diesel the following week, O'Shea had just one question. "How many tickets do the subs get for an All-Ireland final?" In this place you leave your ego at the door.
Still, the Wednesday between the two Mayo games held no laughter. O Se admits he was "kind of dumb-founded" by the call. As a family, Marc and his brothers would always be considered "tight" with Fitzmaurice. But they know him too to be his own man and, in this instance, he was showing it.
The pair of them chatted "for ages", basically agreeing to disagree. It wasn't a heated exchange, simply two old friends pulling different ways.
"I was taken aback really" Marc remembers now. "I said to him 'Look Eamonn, I disagree with this decision.' I thought I did a lot of good things in the drawn game. I felt it was kind of un-warranted.
"To be fair to him, he was saying 'We might well be getting this wrong but as a management we've decided to do this..' There's nothing you can do then. Ultimately you're just a team-member, you're not above it. And you've to act accordingly.
"My brother, Tomas, made number five his own for years, but he went last year. Then the jersey was taken by Paul Murphy who gets Man of the Match in the All-Ireland final!
"Playing with Kerry, you're only passing through."
Naturally, he rang both Tomas and Darragh that evening for some wise counsel. Both delivered the same, essential echo. "Suck it up Marc, suck it up!"
He did too, but it was hard.
Fitzmaurice wanted the decision kept "in-house", Kerry naming an unchanged team for the replay. "I suppose you need to be a bit steely-tough for it" reflects O Se now. "It takes a bigger man I suppose to be dropped and hold his counsel. But I had to look at the bigger picture of team. And there's a fierce team ethic about the set-up since Eamonn took over. I'd bought into that ethic myself, so couldn't be slipping out of it now.
"But I was very nervous before that replay. I was fretting over little things. Like will I wear my track-suit out there or will I just go out in togs and jersey? I felt I had to concentrate on all the positions in the back line because I could be coming on at any stage.
"You're doing your warm-up along the sideline, doing stretches and there's somebody behind you shouting 'Sit down!' They can't see the game. Some animal behind me! (laughing). You just feel out of place."
Peter Crowley went down with an early injury so O Se was sent sprinting down the line. Crowley recovered. Then, in the 22nd minute, management decided to make a change, O Se going on in place of Shane Enright.
Cue momentary panic. "Couldn't find my gum-shield" he chuckles now. "Lost it in the dug-out. So I'm out on the field without one and referees have given yellow cards for that before. I was just a ball of nerves."
An early gallop down the wing, settled his stomach. But this was still unknown territory.
He'd been asking Declan O'Sullivan about the dynamics of it, of stepping essentially cold into the cauldron of a Championship bear-pit. O'Sullivan's is one of those voices that people want to listen to. A marquee forward all his career, he was now recalibrating to the life of a substitute.
O'Sullivan's view was that it was harder to influence a game off the bench, that getting to the pace of it in mid-stream presented a different challenge. "Probably shouldn't have spoken to him at all" O Se laughs now.
"Because what he was saying was making me more nervous."
It is history now that Kerry won in extra-time and that the youngest of the O Se brothers played a stormer for 58 of the 80 minutes. History too that he then held his place for the final against Donegal.
"Without doubt, that replay was the best game I was ever involved in" O Se reflects now. "I'd even go so far as to say it was the highlight of my career. Just as regards the pure intensity of it, the delight when it was over.
"I'll always remember the Mayo goalkeeper lining up that free at the end of normal time. You're standing there, thinking 'Is this it? Are we gone now?'"
In the dressing-room after, O Se and Fitzmaurice met in a great, warm bear-hug. "Jesus you're one stubborn man" smiled Fitzmaurice.
"Takes one to know one" grinned O Se.
The cloud proved slow to clear on their year and the reasons for pessimism stockpiled.
Tomas had been just one of three high-profile retirees alongside Paul Galvin and Eoin Brosnan. Then there was the season-wrecking injury to 'Gooch'. When Cork arrived in Tralee on April 6 for a National League game that ended in the Kingdom's heaviest fall to their neighbours since the 1990 Munster final, Fitzmaurice's plans seemed in tatters.
O Se was hauled ashore midway through the second-half of that ten point shelling, recalling it as "an awful day". He reflects "It was just a terrible performance by the team. I remember questioning myself after. I was just finding it impossible to influence the game in any way. I had no qualms with Eamonn taking me off, because I wasn't up to it that day. I genuinely wasn't up to it.
"But I remember we had a team-meeting afterwards and Eamonn was so calm. His message was that we'd turn things round, that there was no need for panic. We went away shortly after that for a training week in Portugal and you could feel things coming together.
"It just showed that the season is a marathon, not a sprint. When you think of it, Kieran Donaghy was nowhere at the time. David Moran was nowhere. Yet these two fellas were our most influential players come the All-Ireland semi-final and final."
Having defeated Mayo, they shared the popular assumption that Dublin would be their final opponents. O Se was driving to Santry with Darran O'Sullivan and Stephen O'Brien the day of the second semi-final, following the game through radio commentary.
As each Donegal goal was intercepted by a great peal of northern thunder, they felt themselves become re-acquainted with a familiar challenge.
In Marc O Se's career with Kerry, their relationship with Ulster football has - at times - been an uncomfortable one. Most painfully, they lost to Tyrone in the Championships of '03, '05 and '08. And when, finally, getting the better of Mickey Harte's team in 2012, they were promptly beaten next time out by Donegal. They also lost to Down in 2010 and, for O'Se, the most painful memory of all, the '02 All-Ireland final loss to Armagh.
Why?
Perhaps because it was his first proper year as an inter-county footballer and, looking back, he had so much still to learn. "That final is one of my biggest regrets now" he says bluntly. "I was eleven stone that day and I suppose I was giving Diarmuid Marsden, a great footballer, four stone. I would have been marking Gooch in a lot of sessions leading up to that final whereas I suppose if I'd been put on the likes of Johnny Crowley, someone a bit more physical, I might have been better prepared. Ten years later, I was thirteen three or thirteen four.
"The old story I suppose. If I knew then what I know now…."
So Donegal loomed again, an aura of almost robotic efficiency restored under Jim McGuinness. Had they got Kerry spooked?
"No" he says flatly. "On our day, we'd feel we could beat anyone. Do you know, even at the start of the year, with all the retirements, Gooch's injury and all the rest, I remember still thinking we could win the All-Ireland."
He has a photograph in his phone of Tralee's Denny Street the night of the homecoming, an impossibly large throng captured in gorgeous autumn sunlight.
In the end, the season held a kind of perfection for Kerry. The old, neglected gentry of the south re-asserting themselves on a game they were being told had left them behind.
He thought a lot about his late father, Micheal, the week of the final. He thought a lot about Paidi too. Last Saturday, they had a Mass in Ventry for the second anniversary of Paidi's death. He would have been a grandfather now, daughter Neasa having recently given birth to a baby girl.
The gathering was lovely and intimate and awash with stories that have been recycled a million times.
"The man was lawless, liable to do anything" Marc chuckles. "In a roguish way, of course. You know I watched a lovely YouTube clip of him the other night, a seven-minute tribute. And you're sitting there thinking 'Where have those two years gone?'
"I'd have loved to have been able to tap into Paidi's experience this year. You know he got dropped himself in '88 and I know he didn't speak to Mick O'Dwyer for a few years after that happened. That was never going to happen between me and Eamonn, but I'd love to have been able to chat to Paidi about it."
The future will find its own path now.
O Se's injury meant he was lost to his club, Gaeltacht, as well as to West Kerry this year. That galled him. For Gaeltacht, especially, times have been difficult. They recently had to overcome Keel in a relegation play-off simply to retain Division Three status in Kerry. For a club that got to an All-Ireland final under the management of Marc's eldest brother, Feargal, in '04, the fall from grace has been shuddering.
SHUDDERING
But O Se was involved this year with Dara O Cinneide and Tomas O Muircheartaigh over an under-21 team that won this year's county title. Ten of that team are already playing senior.
"It's been a roller-coaster for our club, but these young fellas coming through are definitely the future" he says.
And Kerry?
"I don't want to let go" he says. "I hope I'm not being a bit blind, but I don't think I am. I think there's definitely more left in the tank. I certainly don't see myself having any God-given right to be on the team next year, but that's my intention. To be on it.
"It's very hard to walk away, especially with the likes of Gooch and Tommy (Walsh) coming back. Sure it's like you've two new signings there straight away, even two potential 'Footballers of the Year'.
"Then you've Darran (O'Sullivan) who just didn't get a free run at it this year and you've the young lads who now have the confidence of winning. I did think about walking away from it, I suppose especially with the year that I had. On one level, it might have been the perfect way to sign off.
"But I couldn't do it. I still feel I have the hunger. I might be on the team next year, I mightn't be. But I'm not going back in to make up numbers."
