Kerry defender Gavin White seems unlikely to play in the All-Ireland football final as he awaits the results of a scan on his knee.
White hobbled out of last Sunday’s semi-final win over Dublin and, with just over a week to the decider against Galway, his chances of regaining full fitness in time seem unlikely going by the comments of Kerry boss Jack O’Connor.
“We’re just waiting for a report on it,” said O’Connor. “He had a scan done so we have to wait.
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“He’s doubtful at the minute, which is disappointing for him. I don’t know what the nature of the injury is - it’s knee-related. Other than that now lads, I’d be telling you lies if I told you what it was.”
He added: “It was a twist or something. Something to do with the way he turned. He was trying to do a bit of a cut or a twist. Look, all I know is he wouldn’t come off the field in a game like that if he wasn’t injured. He certainly wasn’t faking it.”
O’Connor said that bar a few knocks and bruises from the Dublin game there are no other injury worries to report, though there is the ongoing concern of Covid-19 infiltrating the camp.
“I suppose there was three or four didn’t train last night,” he explained. “Just hoping they’ll settle down.
“The elephant in the room then is Covid. You’re just hoping the way Covid is at the moment that it doesn’t spread into the camp because it’s something out of your control and that’s every manager’s nightmare.”
O'Connor, meanwhile, says it’s not possible to effectively combine a demanding full-time job with managing a county team.
The Kerry boss was speaking at his team’s press day ahead of Sunday week’s All-Ireland football final against Galway, 11 years after he last presented himself at such an event as Kingdom manager.
The two seasons that O’Connor recently spent in charge of Kildare along this the first year of his third stint in Kerry have opened his eyes as to how the demands of playing and managing at inter-county level have ramped up.
O’Connor, who is now retired from secondary school teaching, said: “The job has become bigger in the sense that there are more people to manage, backroom team is bigger, the game to all intensive purposes is semi-professional now.
“Let’s call a spade a spade, the amount of time these lads are putting into it, the amount of time the backroom are putting into it, outside of going full-time I couldn’t think of any more that the players could put into it.
“It’s very time-consuming, but I’m in the lucky position that I’m retired and I have the time and the energy to put into it. But I literally can’t envisage somebody with a demanding full-time job doing this job. I don't think you’d be able to do either job properly.
“Even outside of trying to do the actual job, the toll it takes on you - you actually need time to recover from that as well.
“The last two or three days there now after the semi-final; if I had to go to work God only knows what kind of work I’d be doing, because you are just exhausted and your head is scrambled and you haven’t slept.
“The demands now on an inter-county manager are massive, absolutely massive and that’s why they get so cranky when they get a bit of grief."
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