“Next thing anyway there was soft tomato smashed off the back of my head” – Marc Ó Sé

The warm weather training didn’t seem to get to the Kerry lads.

With Kildare jetting off to Portugal for a warm-weather training camp, Marc Ó Sé spoke on the GAA Hour about the trips abroad. You can read about the day to day in the camps here. But it’s not all go with the lads when they are away. When asked about how players deal with being left idle in their downtime, Marc revealed the bad influence that his older brother Tomás and Paul Galvin had on the younger lads.

“Boredom does come into it and that’s when lads start, and that’s when the messing starts… I remember there was one night we were inside our apartment and it was so warm we had the door open and next thing anyway there was soft tomato smashed off the back of my head and I said ‘Where the hell did this come out of?’"  “It was Tomas and Galvin and you see what they do is that they have two older fellas in with two younger fellas and Tomas and Galvin had these two younger fellas who were just on the panel (in their room)."  “But the following day anyway there was all out war then and there was a huge food fight the following night and then I remember Galvin saying to me (about) the young fella that was with him in the apartment, so we were having our food the following day and then next thing this fella had his pockets full of tomatoes, yoghurts and he turns to Paul and says ‘look at the ammunition I have for tonight Paul, we’re definitely sorted for tonight’ and Galvin was saying to me that he’s created a right beast here.”  “Sure that’s it, you just get up to all sorts and players, they get bored and they get up to good things and then they get up to not so good things but I suppose in the professional scene the fact that you are professional it has been well illustrated down through the years the different teams but we were in a compound so there wasn’t much bad stuff you could get up to really, it was all innocent fun.”

However, Marc was quick to reiterate although there was a fair share of messing that the Kerry squad were hard at work when abroad.

“I suppose the county board were putting all that money together for us and it was important so we probably behaved ourselves over there as well and we realised we were one of the lucky teams and not all inter-county teams go over there and there definitely was a maturity to our group as well that at the end of the day when we were out there we knew we had to work hard and that’s something we definitely did.”

No trouble in paradise for Kerry anyway… You can listen to Marc's full interview below starting from 15:40