Diarmuid Murphy believes Kerry will need to evolve their game if they are to retain the All-Ireland football title.
With their early-season preparations delayed by a team holiday and disrupted by injuries, Kerry have used the break leading into Saturday's Munster semi-final against Tipperary to build improvements onto the work done in a mixed league campaign.
The nature of the league meant experimentation was mandatory and the form of Murphy’s Dingle clubmate Barry 'Dan' O’Sullivan was a major positive after David Moran’s retirement and long-term injuries to Joe O’Connor and, more recently, Stefan Okunbor.
The Dingle dynamo, now 27, hadn’t played for Kerry since the 2018 league and has yet to make his championship debut, but scored 1-03 in six starts this spring.
It was the strength and conditioning work done at club level that enabled him to make the step back into the All-Ireland-winning camp.
"Barry wasn’t even involved with us at all last year," says Kerry selector Murphy.
"Barry has been working hard with Dingle for the last couple of years. Having been involved with Dingle myself, Shane O’Rourke and a couple more of the boys back there have been doing massive S&C work with Dingle over the last few years so the shortfall wasn’t huge for him to make up coming into the county scene."
It’s not just retirements and injuries that make O’Sullivan’s emergence as a fresh option more important but also the new-look round-robin championship format which will test squad depth more than ever before.
"Coming in contributing as well as he did will be important with the nature of the round-robin this year," agrees Murphy.
"Having a strong squad and lads who are able to flit in and flit out of the team will be very important.
"That's probably the main positive we got out of the league this year really."
As for O’Sullivan’s individual attributes, Murphy says: "Barry is a good solid fella, confident lad. He’s sure of his own ability and I think he has matured a lot over the last two or three years physically and in terms of his football as well.
"He’s good on the ball and under a kick-out. He’s able to drive on and kick a score and set up a score which is important in midfielders in the modern game. Especially against defensive set-ups that you have a player like that that can do that.
"He is making the most of his opportunity now. We’re delighted to have him in there and delighted to see him performing as well as he is.
"It was a question of getting the form right really, that was the thing for him. I wasn’t involved with Dingle last year but he was outstanding. I thought he was the form midfielder in the county championship last year.
"When you are involved with Kerry, it is important you reward fellas who do well in county championship and if they are performing in that, that’s what we go on when we are looking for new fellas for the squad."
O’Sullivan wasn’t the only notable returnee to the inter-county game Murphy was asked about. There’s also the matter of eight-time All-Ireland-winner Stephen Cluxton’s return to the Dublin fold.
Murphy, a fellow All-Star shot-stopper, believes the strength and conditioning catch-up is a secondary matter.
"We certainly don't have the physical training to do that maybe some of the other lads do, even though now the goalies train as hard as most of the rest of the players. It’s a very individual thing, everyone is different.
"The key thing is for someone coming back into a squad like that, I saw Mike McCarthy coming back in with us in ’09, is that they have the hunger for it themselves because you are not going to come back into a scene like that unless you are pushing it yourself and you’re keen to get back in there and you are ambitious.
"I’m sure all those boxes have been ticked and it’s a huge positive for Dublin."
Kerry getting over the line against the Dubs last summer en route to a first All-Ireland in eight years should only add strings to their bow for the title defence.
"You would hope that our lads having won their first All-Ireland would take a lot of confidence and belief from that," says Murphy.
"You’ll see that coming into play when we get to the big games, especially in the last 10 or 15 minutes.
"I think it’s a big thing that you’ve done it before and you’ve won those big matches before and seen them out in the past. That confidence should stand to you when you get to the cutting edge of the big games later in the year."
As for the job of work to be done to retain their title, Murphy believes those evolutions are key to not allowing other teams to catch up.
"We have work to do. After our league, there are some positives there but there is definitely room for improvement there.
"How would I put this… sometimes yes, you do need something different but it could be you might do something different with the same personnel that are there and have fresh fellas coming through as well so it is a mixture of both.
"But yeah, coming back with exactly the same thing probably wouldn’t get the job done. You probably do need to have something up your sleeve as the year goes on."
Watch Waterford v Limerick in the Munster Hurling Championship on Sunday from 1.30pm on RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player, follow a live blog on the RTÉ News app or RTÉ.ie/Sport or listen to live commentary on Sunday Sport on RTÉ Radio 1
Watch Roscommon v Galway in the Connacht Football Championship semi-final on Sunday from 3.45pm on RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player, follow a live blog on the RTÉ News app or RTÉ.ie/Sport or listen to live commentary on Sunday Sport on RTÉ Radio 1
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