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Tomás Ó Sé Opinion My team and player of the year, and why in brutal terms, Mayo just weren't good enough

I remember reading a Liam McHale interview once, in which this idea of a Mayo curse was being explored, and he saw it for what I believe most intelligent people in the county see it – a complete nonsense.

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Tomás Ó Sé Opinion For God’s sake don’t go backing it but it’s a romantic vote for Mayo by the tiniest of fractions

Con Houlihan once quipped that that great GAA word ‘schemozzle’ was, in truth, Yiddish for a fracas.

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Tomás Ó Sé Opinion I have no agenda other than the belief that change is needed in Kerry

There’s been a predictably toxic fall-out to Kerry’s defeat last weekend, the hard chaws of social media cutting loose on all and sundry.

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Tomás O Sé Opinion Michael Duignan visit convinced me Offaly opportunity was too good to pass up

I think it was the day of the Munster hurling final that Michael Duignan came to my house in Cork, selling the idea of me coming on board with Offaly footballers.

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Tomás Ó Sé Opinion Football-wise, Kerry have the better team - but, sometimes, football isn’t enough

I couldn’t help wonder was it someone being mischievous or just an accident of timing that RTÉ’s repeat of Reeling in the Years on Tuesday evening deposited us all back to 2003.

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Tomás Ó Sé Opinion Tyrone won’t care that there are still questions they haven’t answered

I’ve always admired the sense of difference that Tyrone project through their football teams, the contrariness, the snapping dog in their soul. They just don’t care how others see them and bow to no-one. It can make them spiky and mean in battle, but that edge is a central part of their character too.

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Tomás Ó Sé Opinion Same old failing will come back to haunt Mayo in another tilt at the champions

How sobering it is to think that we’re now 17 years on from that moment Michael Lyster so famously turned to Colm O’Rourke at half-time in the ’04 All-Ireland final and suggested they were “looking at a murder scene”.

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Tomás Ó Sé Opinion Tackling our game’s big issue – why defending is a dying art

Watching the ’83 episode of Reeling in the Years lately, it struck me that lads could be jailed today for some of the stuff that went on in that year’s All-Ireland football final.

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Tomás Ó Sé Opinion No better man than Jack to put pressure on Dubs

Isn’t it a credit to Jack O’Connor that he’s still around? It’s heading for a quarter of a century since Páidí drafted him in as a selector with Kerry and it’s 17 years since he won his first senior All-Ireland title as a manager.

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Tomás Ó Se Opinion The Munster decider is set to be one-sided in nature ... it’s totally unthinkable Kingdom don’t win this one

When a quiet man raises his voice, the noise of a dressing-room is seldom slow to abate.

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Tomás Ó Sé Opinion For 15 years nobody has managed to crack Cluxton – but ironically he could to be the one who cracks the Dubs

A stand-out passage in Bernard Brogan’s autobiography, ‘The Hill’, is one in which he challenges Jim Gavin essentially on what he sees as the Dublin manager lapsing into double-standards.

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Tomás Ó Sé Opinion As long as we stay tethered to the provincial structure, we’re tied to a championship no longer fit for purpose

God, I loved that Twitter clip of Liam Sheedy during a water break in Limerick last Sunday, essentially micro-managing his players in the white heat of battle.

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Tomás Ó Sé Opinion ‘No bravado, no bulls**t – the day I got a first-hand look at how Kieran McGeeney operates’

It’s an October Sunday in 2002 and I’m in a Croke Park dressing-room trying hard to connect with my patriotic duty.

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Tomás Ó Sé Opinion Kerry will have learned little from the League but goals will be crucial to dethroning the Dubs

There has to be a small fear in Kerry ribcages that the lies of the league will make fools of us over the next two months.

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Tomás Ó Sé Opinion The elephant in the GAA's room is a structure protecting the provincial football championships

I love that Jack Nicholson line in the movie As Good As it Gets where the receptionist asks his character, Melvin Udall, how he manages to capture women so well in his writing.

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Tomás Ó Sé Opinion For the next month, it’s going to be wall-to-wall Mbappe, Ronaldo and Kane - our culture of secrecy does the GAA no favours

There’s an old Irish expression used where I come from, ‘Tadhg an dá thaobh’, that translates roughly into somebody being two-faced, or speaking out of both sides of their mouth.

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Tomás Ó Sé Opinion Teams are going for the gap now instead of barricading it – how football has evolved over last 10 years

I was doing a gig with Henry Shefflin on Wednesday and it struck me that this was maybe the first time I could sit next to a hurling god and not feel I represented some kind of lower caste.

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Tomás Ó Sé Opinion We have to let the game we all love breathe again

In the GAA, our knee-jerk response to a game tangled up in stoppages and frees has always been to blame the referee. It’s an age-old thing, a reflex as natural as sneezing. But referees, broadly, don’t get consulted about rules. They are simply cursed to implement them, irrespective of whether they consider them good law or bad.

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Tomás O Sé Opinion It’s time for Kerry to banish those demons and find an edge

The uncle is buck naked as I remember it, strolling around a Thurles dressing-room as if he’s in the middle of his own parlour.

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Tomás Ó Sé Opinion The challenge for the 'big four' chasing pack is to hit the ground running quickly

I’ve had Johnny Cash’s voice rolling around inside my head all week, specifically that song of his recommending the sanctuary of rhythm whenever you have the blues.

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Tomás Ó Sé Opinion I'm uncomfortable with what feels like the virtual criminalisation of amateur athletes out training in a field

Five years from now, how will we remember these days?

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Tomás O'Sé Opinion Dessie Farrell bears the brunt for stupid Dublin decision but ultimately he won’t miss a whole lot

I WAS picking up a rotavator around 7.30 on Thursday morning when it was put to me that the “Dubs might be in trouble” for this year’s All-Ireland. Blissfully unaware of the story unspooling in these very pages, my flippant response was “only if I take this yoke up to Croke Park and dig up the bloody pitch!”

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Tomás O'Sé Opinion Let kids back now, they’ve suffered enough

So, over a year into this war with Covid, where exactly do we find ourselves? Running to stand-still, I fear. This lockdown is damaging people in ways, I suspect, that will only become apparent down the line.

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Tomás Ó Sé Opinion When Dublin had 14 men, Mayo had a chance - they weren't going to get a second one

Maybe Mayo gave glimmers of hope to the rest on Saturday night but, as ever in that argument, it was hope delivered in half-measures.

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Tomás Ó Sé Opinion To hammer the hammer, Mayo must risk getting nailed

Where I come from, it's fair to say the pity gland isn't over-used.

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Tomás Ó Sé Opinion Level of vitriol on social media is nothing short of disgraceful - It's not about pro-Dub or anti-Dub

Kevin Heffernan once described the almost perfect timing of Dublin's 1974 All-Ireland win in a broadly miserable Ireland as there being "a space for us to make a difference".

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Tomás Ó Sé Opinion Underdogs can still bare teeth but fear is the key to avoid getting bitten

Small outbreaks of madness are no harm when you’re trying to bring the walls of a city down and I heard a story about Thomas Galligan that should leave Dublin in little doubt about what’s rolling their way now.

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Tomás Ó Sé Opinion Leinster's 10 'sick children' need real help, not empty lectures about working harder

"Oh my God, we are all wrecked here. We kicked every ball. We will never forget the fun we've had inside in the house today, screaming, shouting and kicking. It was like a battlefield in the living-room!"

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Tomás Ó Sé Opinion Neutral venue would help level semi-final playing field

It's hard to miss the sense of this championship as a speeding train, now catapulting towards a familiar destination.

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Tomás Ó Sé Opinion The lack of fight in Kerry last Sunday was, to my mind, the worst I’ve seen since Meath walked all over us in 2001

I'd say one of the longest winters we ever put down in Kerry was after Cork turned us over in the 1999 Munster final.