HAVING eased through Munster and the All-Ireland round-robin series, Jack O’Connor finally felt Kerry had been in a “a real tough battle” after eventually seeing off Derry in Sunday’s All-Ireland quarter-final.
Although the Oak Leafs offered little as an attacking force, apart from Shane McGuigan’s first half tour de force, a laboured Kingdom side struggled to break them down until the final 10 minutes.
It was a far cry from last year’s exhilarating All-Ireland semi-final when the pair traded blows – either way, though, the end result was the same as Kerry won this game of cat and mouse to set up a mouth-watering last four clash with Armagh.
“What did I make of it? A real tough battle - more or less what we expected,” said O’Connor.
“It probably wasn’t a game for the purists because it was defensive, but we were happy to play the game on whatever terms we came across. Derry set the terms early on, they got a rake of men back and made it tough for us to find space.
“I just thought we were playing around the periphery in the first half. In the second half, we made an agreement that we would go at the game aggressively. I thought we started to find pockets in the second half and just showed a bit more intensity and a bit more energy.
“We felt we would have to get more bodies ahead of the ball to test Derry’s defence a bit; I thought the first half was too easy for them. We weren’t committing enough bodies and we were playing everything in front of them.
“I thought we got runners going through the lines and just those pop-passes inside with runners coming off them, we got that going a lot better in the second half.”
In the end, the strength of the Kerry bench – compared to the limited impact from Derry’s subs – proved the winning of the game.
Cillian Burke, Killian Spillane and Dylan Geaney all made significant contributions upon their introduction, and that late impact always had the potential to swing the game.
“That’s a tough game to play,” added the Dromid Pearses man.
“When you’re playing that kind of game, you have to run 100 yards back after a turnover. That’s energy-sapping. That’s a lot of running. We were fairly sure that fellas were going to struggle after 50 minutes so it was very important that we got energy off the bench.
“They certainly gave us that.”