IN SUCCESSFUL COUNTIES, assessments of the team are never couched in measured terms.

If things are going well, then you’re up for years with no end in sight for your domination; the flipside being that when expectations are low, there is no bedrock. We’re finished, pack the whole thing up.

So it was in Kerry before the Munster SFC final against Cork. With the hosts as favourites, the previews just about stopped short of wondering if Kerry would fulfil the fixture. The fans certainly were more in hope than anything else, but, a 12-point win later, the talk is now of adding yet another title to the 36 already claimed.

Thankfully, Kerry manager Eamonn Fitzmaurice is a calm and steady individual. While the supporters may go from 0-60 in the space of one game, with victory against Galway in Sunday’s All-Ireland quarter-final (2pm) almost taken as a given, the Lixnaw man is happy to only focus on internal views.

“The beauty about football is that there are a lot of opinions out there and about sport in general,” he says.

“Everyone has an opinion and in Kerry especially, football, is so important to everyone that people are going to have opinions. If you were looking at the Munster final and analysing it, the only thing that people had to go on was on the Cork game in Tralee and the Clare game in Ennis and so the public was not 100 percent convinced.

“In the lead-in to the Cork game, we were happy, where we were at, but a lot of people were shooting in the dark, because they did not know what was going on within the group. I suppose then when you win and it goes the other way, it’s something you just accept.

“But the only opinions that count to me really are the player’s opinions, the management and my back room team around me, and ultimately my opinion, they are the only opinions that count. We know that we did well in Cork, but we know at the same time, that we have to improve again for the Galway game of we are going to win it.”

A factor in the supporters’ lack of insight is the decision by Fitzmaurice upon his appointment last year to close training sessions. While the primary motivation was to keep away opposition spies, he believes that the team benefited from the new environment.

“My reasoning for doing the closed-door sessions at the start,” he says, “is that I felt that in any elite sport, for an opposition person to be able to come into training, sit down and watch what a team is doing, particularly when the game has gone so tactical, it just did not make sense to me.

“A person coming in one night to watch a session, they would get a feel for it but I know that there people consistently coming to Kerry training sessions, If you are consistently there, you know how the team is doing, you know who is going well, you know who is not going well, what’s good for one fellow, how you might be able to mark another fellow. So I did not want that going out, how we were going, and good bad or indifferent.

“The other side of it was that I found when we started doing it, there was a completely different environment in the Fitzgerald Stadium, with only ourselves there for training. It was just a fantastic training environment because it as just us. During my whole career, I trained in Killarney in front of people and I took no notice of it, because that was the way it was.

“But when you go the other way and it’s just us inside there, then everybody is more focussed I think. So it as something that I decided I wanted once I got the job, and I know that there are people who are not happy about it, and I can understand their viewpoint, because they have been used to going to Kerry training sessions, their whole lives, but I felt that it was slightly compromising us and I felt that it was another avenue that we might get something out of, by closing the gates.”

Kerry manager Eamonn Fitzmaurice at the Leinster final recently. James Crombie / INPHO James Crombie / INPHO / INPHO

When Kerry are not training and playing, Fitzmaurice is scouting, travelling the country to watch games and take notes on potential opponents. That he is a secondary teacher — this year he led Pobalscoil Chorca Dhuibhne to the Hogan Cup (All-Ireland Colleges SAFC) — is a big advantage.

“Well, the way I look at it, this time of the year, I am off work — it gives me an opportunity if we are not training to go to games,” he says.

“One part of it is of course running the eye over teams you might meet down along the tracks, but you can learn things as well, you are learning new ideas the whole time. So by going and watching other teams, by seeing the way they do things, the way they are interacting, the way management is interacting with their players, the warm ups they do, you will always pick up something.

“It comes back to the fact that I enjoy going to the games, and I am lucky with job I have that I don’t have to worry about getting up the following morning at 7.15am to go to work, I can relax a bit the next day, I am probably lucky enough in that regard.

“I suppose anyone who is working a 40-hour week just manages because they are good at managing their time. But certainly at this time of the year, when it’s at its most intense, it would be challenging to try and hold down a serious job and being an intercounty manager at the same time.”