Seán O’Shea’s Kerry career is always going to be a series of milestones. When you’re the man on the frees and you basically never miss a game, having your progress tracked by numbers is unavoidable. Particularly when they’re as remarkable as the ones against O’Shea’s name.
So let’s start with a few standouts – and in all this, a hefty tip of the hat is due to the heroes on the Terrace Talk website for their stats. This Sunday will be O’Shea’s 50th league game for Kerry. In the 49 he’s played since his debut in 2018, O’Shea has scored 5-225. That means that in league games alone, O’Shea has scored more than Kerry players such as John Egan, “Bomber” Liston and James O’Donoghue did in their entire league and championship careers.
If you take O’Shea’s scoring records in league and championship as a whole, he sits fourth on the all-time Kerry list on 12-479 (515 points). The only players ahead of him are Mikey Sheehy (610), David Clifford (569) and Colm Cooper (552). Only O’Shea, Clifford and Sheehy have averaged more than five points a game for Kerry.
This one might be the best of them. That 479 after the dash is significant – in the history of Kerry football, nobody has scored more points (as in, non-goals, the basic act of kicking or handpassing the ball over the bar) than Seán O’Shea. It was during his monumental display against Donegal in this year’s league that he overtook Sheehy in this regard. Barring injury, this summer’s championship will see him be the first to pass 500.
READ MORE
In the past two months, he has overtaken Mick O’Dwyer and Maurice Fitzgerald on the all-time Kerry scoring charts. Assuming normal scoring rates, he will leapfrog Colm Cooper sometime in the next four or five games. These are the gods of Kerry football and O’Shea will have bypassed them before his 28th birthday. While it’s fair to argue they never had a chance to kick a two-pointer, it’s equally true that they didn’t have seven seasons of blanket defences to negotiate.
The point is, O’Shea is a generational Kerry footballer. Not just a very good one, not just a widely admired and respected one. But rather, one who has a reasonable shout to be considered among their all-time greats – and who probably would be, if he didn’t happen to be born six months before David Clifford.
In a way, O’Shea and Clifford had pretty much identical careers. They both won two minor All-Irelands before they were seniors. They made their Kerry debut on the same day, against Donegal in January 2018. They’ve played the same number of games – 95 apiece between league and championship. They’ve won two Sam Maguires, four league titles and seven Munsters together.
But there’s only one David Clifford. O’Shea has four All Stars, Clifford has six (as well as three Footballer of the Year awards). O’Shea has been assiduously picking off all those Kerry scoring greats on the climb but Clifford is still a few miles up the mountain ahead of him. There’s every chance they will eventually retire as first and second in every Kerry scoring metric you can come up with. Yet Clifford stands above everyone, including O’Shea.
“It is a curious enough situation,” says Mike Quirke, who spent three years in the set-up as selector to Jack O’Connor. “What you’d normally see in that situation would be two guys vying for the greater amount of oxygen, the greater publicity and acclaim. And neither of them are like that. It just doesn’t exist in my experience of being in there and working with them. Both of them are so dedicated to the process of getting better.
“Look at Seánie’s positional fluidity. He can have a game like he did against Armagh last year where he is the best scoring forward on the team. And then you can look at another game where he might only score a couple of points but he has covered the most ground of anyone, he’ll have the highest high-speed running, two blockdowns and five assists.
“He has all the football characteristics. He has two feet, he’s strong as a bull, he can catch the ball over his head, win it out in front. You can play him everywhere. He is a Swiss army knife, he’s able to do so many things well and yet still be the man to step up and kick a 55-metre bomb to win an All-Ireland semi-final against Dublin.
“David is respected by everyone inside in the group, obviously, because of the work that he puts into his craft. But Seánie also, for his absolute selflessness, for the way he will do absolutely whatever it takes in whatever role to win Kerry a game – the respect level for him because of all of that within the group is colossal. Even if he could be slightly underappreciated in the wider world.”
O’Connor is always interesting in how he talks about O’Shea. The Kerry manager often describes Clifford as a “one-off” or “inspirational” but he has said a few times now that “Seánie is the spiritual leader of that dressingroom”. When O’Connor was railing against the Kerry criticism for the Meath defeat last summer, it was O’Shea’s absence he pointed to as being critical – “We missed him more than anyone when he wasn’t there.”
Ask anyone around the Kerry camp and they’ll tell you leadership is O’Shea’s superpower. He has a natural empathy for people, an ability to connect with everyone. Quirke tells a story about a player whose father died a couple of years after he’d passed through the Kerry panel. They weren’t clubmates or college mates or anything like that, yet O’Shea popped up at the funeral. They had been team-mates once. That was enough.
“He has what you’d associate as an old-school type of leadership,” Quirke says. “When things are really going against you, he’s constantly there as the one who’s trying to pick it back up. But as well as that, he always has the pulse of the group.
“When I was in there, he was always that real sounding board, one of the conduits between management and the players. If something was a bad idea or a good idea, Seánie would be quick to stand up and say it. He was always a real sounding board for management – and when I was there, he was still only 23, 24.
“You saw the interview he gave after the Armagh match last year where he said something along the lines of ‘People don’t know what goes on in our dressingroom. We love each other. We have a really tight group.’
“You don’t often hear GAA players talking openly about that kind of stuff, talking about loving each other and all that. But that, to me, encapsulates Seánie. There’s no fakeness or falseness about him. He’s very genuine and that was a great snapshot of who he is among that group. That’s the nub of any team sport, that your leaders can stand up and be open and genuine about how ye feel about each other.”
How they feel about O’Shea is obvious. The wider world will surely catch up in time.
