Joe O'Connor: 'He’s ahead of the curve. Doesn’t give a f*ck what people think or say about him'

While he humbly took the laurels for his own stellar performance – “It’s a collective effort… We back our squad, people have had to step up, it’s all about the squad really” – O’Connor had the confidence and presence of mind to identify that his target audience wasn’t Damian Lawlor or any neutral on the couch but the Kerry public in the stadium and at home.

O’Connor didn’t raise or clench any fist with a rallying call and mic drop, not least because there was no Celtic Cross yet to hold in the other. But like his famous clubman, mentor and friend, he prompted a big cheer that resounded around Croke Park and left the RTÉ panellists smiling at how uninhibited and self-assured the Tralee lad obviously was.

Wayne Quillinan noticed the parallels and took a certain pride and joy in it. He coached O’Connor when he was in his teens and again in 2021 when they helped bring another senior county championship back to Rock Street. Now O’Connor was growing further in front of his very eyes. In full bloom.

“Joe and Donaghy are probably the two biggest competitors I’ve come across,” says Quillinan. “Kieran would have shown that vocally as well as by example. Joe would have demonstrated it more by his actions.

“But with that interview I could see that Joe’s character and leadership has developed further. Clearly in that Kerry dressing room he is now more vocal and comfortable in demanding standards and driving people on. Knowing him so well, it was lovely to see.” 

Donaghy was similarly pleased but hardly surprised. O’Connor’s personality, like his football, was always there. It’s just taken until 2025 for everyone to see it.

“Joe has always been a team-first leader but also very much his own person,” says Donaghy. “He reminds me of what I was like going into the Kerry dressing room with the backwards cap and basketball attitude. He wears jeans that are 10 times too big for him and everyone’s looking at him: What’s he wearing?!

“But he’s like [Paul] Galvin. People were wondering what Galvin was doing wearing the skinny jeans and thee years later we were all into them. Joe’s the same. He’s big into his fashion, his brother is a model. He’s ahead of the curve. Doesn’t give a fuck what people think or say about him.

“There’s power in that independence. Take me or leave me, I don’t care. He’s a bit like a Michael Darragh Macauley. His own person, authentic, yet will do anything for you and the team to the point of exhaustion. A dressing room needs characters like that.” 

Like Donaghy, football wasn’t O’Connor’s first sport while he was in his teens. Rugby was his game and he not only played it with Tralee RFC but made it onto the Munster Academy squad. Just as with Donaghy though, Austin Stacks always kept the door open. When Quillinan became the club’s minor manager he offered O’Connor a gentle reminder he was more than welcome to walk on through.

“We just let him know, ‘Look, there’s no pressure, we’d love to have you back but we know you’re focused on the rugby.’ But as that year went on he began to come along more and more.

“That year we played [Tralee rivals] Na Gaeil in a county league semi-final and in the first half Diarmuid O’Connor was running the show for them. We brought Joe on at half-time. He single-handedly turned and won the game for us. From that game on you could see that though he had played little football for the previous two or three years, he had this fierce competitive edge.

“It’s evident in everything you do or he does. If you’re doing a warm-up he will not allow himself to drop a ball. When you go into runs, he wants to be at the top every time. If you go into a one-to-one tackling drill, he will want to take it off you or blow past you. He wants to be the best because he wants to be the best he can be.” 

As a broad-minded coach and a multi-sport athlete himself, Quillinan could appreciate the benefits as well as the inevitability of a lad in a town like Tralee playing other sports. That a Joe O’Connor is better not just for himself but Stacks and Kerry for having played less football and more rugby for a while.

“The biggest thing he has brought from the rugby is his timing coming off the shoulder. And once he gets a step on you, he’s very hard to stop, between his power and that side-step that he’d have got from the rugby too.” By 2021, O’Connor, like his club side, was on a mission. Quillinan remembers walking to the club field with his son during lockdown early on that year and invariably they’d find O’Connor there, practising his shooting with either foot. Some of his efforts off his left weren’t pretty, and Quillinan walking at the side of the field would end up being an accidental ball retriever. O’Connor continued, unaffected.

That season after every championship game each Stacks player would nominate a couple of plays by a teammate that exemplified the hard work they were putting in both under the lights and away from them. After every game an O’Connor highlight was in the top five.

A club championship group game down in Dingle when they were eight down at the third-quarter water-break – for the players it turned on O’Connor bursting through to win a penalty when a Dingle defenders were trying to take his head off. The club championship final against Kenmare – he kicked a point off that left foot he’d worked on during lockdown.

In the county championship itself Stacks’ first-round opponents were defending champions East Kerry. A run and goal through the middle from O’Connor swung the game for Stacks. In the semi-final against St Brendan’s when Stacks shipped a goal in the last minute that left them a point behind, a teammate noted that O’Connor urged all around him: Still believe – go again. Stacks went upfield, equalised, won on penalties.

In the county final against arch rivals Kerins O’Rahillys, he hammered the hammer by thundering into David Moran with an early, legitimate shoulder. Minutes later Moran had to cry off injured. O’Connor ended up as the game’s man of the match and a county champion.

It’s not a coincidence that Stacks’ run ended in the Munster final when O’Connor had to hobble off against St Finbarr’s. Or that they were relegated the following year after O’Connor did his cruciate.

But such setbacks only delayed his progress. They would not deter it. In 2022 he made it back from the Barrs game to be a sporadically-used sub and lift one ear of Sam Maguire alongside Seánie O’Shea. The cruciate meant he was a marginal figure in 2023 but he put in the work to be a regular starter for Kerry in 2024. This year he has made the jump from starter to star.

“Everyone saw how good he was against us [Amagh] in Croke Park but you should have seen him against Armagh in the league game in Tralee,” says Donaghy. “He just overpowered us. He was a bully around the place, getting in fellas’ faces, minding his own fellas, everything you’d want around the middle.

“We [Kerry fans will be glad to note that Donaghy in this instance is referring to his native rather than adopted county] needed that enforcer. We had it in Darragh [Ó Sé] for a long time. David Moran did it. And now Joe has embraced it.

“People get hung up about whether he’s best at wing forward or in midfield. Look, he mightn’t go in for the throw-in and instead start on the wing for the first 10 seconds but after that it’s the middle of the field is where he’s playing. He’s everywhere.” 

Matthew Ruane can testify to that; if there were league All-Stars he was a shoo-in for one only for O’Connor to hammer that Mayo hammer in the league final. In the Munster semi-final against Cork, Eoghan Cormican calculated that as well as having a hand in Kerry’s first two goals and scoring the third himself with a screamer into the top corner, O’Connor forced three turnovers, broke four kickouts down to a teammate and then won four clean himself, including three in extra-time.

In Darragh Ó Sé’s eyes, he’s “reached new heights” since returning to Croke Park. If Kerry were to do a similar exercise to Stacks 2021, he’d constantly be towards the top of any list of the one-percenters as Éamonn Fitzmaurice used to term them. The 14-0 power play against Armagh started with two points from O’Connor. When Kerry were struggling early on against Tyrone, O’Connor helped stem the bleeding with a series of turnovers, then won a few frees, then popped over a few scores himself before David Clifford’s decisive goal.

When Kerry last won the All-Ireland, O’Connor, without quite being an imposter, seemed somewhat out of place lifting Sam Maguire with Seánie O’Shea. That he was only there because of Kerry’s tradition and Stacks’ insistence that the county champions nominate a team captain.

Look at that pic now. We all now know what Quillinan and Donaghy and the Stacks club knew back then. He belongs there.