Preparation had been as hiccup-free as could be expected, everyone was fit, the rest of the country had even been convinced that Mayo stood a chance. But a slave to a worrying mind will look for trouble before it comes looking for him so he wanted to quickly kick the tyres of Brosnan's mood, see if it was ready for the road.

There was a fair chance it wasn't.

Brosnan had been dropped for the final with O'Connor's clubmate Declan O'Sullivan taking his place on the 40.

All manner of talk was swirling about the county as to the reasoning behind it - much of it centring on who would get to lift Sam - and O'Connor had even been sent an abusive text earlier in the week from a family member of one of the squad telling him he should be ashamed for what he'd done and hoping it would backfire on him.

And now, on Sunday morning, O'Connor's invitation to Brosnan was going unanswered. The worrying mind felt it had found its trouble.

The squad went and got Mass and as they left the chapel and walked back up the road together, O'Connor decided to get Brosnan to hang back and walk alongside him. He told him to be positive, told him it would work out for him that afternoon, that it would work out for all of them. And Brosnan, cool as you like, assured his manager that he was fine, that he'd put the disappointment behind him and was ready for whatever he needed him for.

Later that day, Eoin Brosnan scored 1-1 from the bench as Mayo were flamegrilled and Kerry won their 34th All Ireland. Also later that day, Declan O'Sullivan hoisted one handle of the cup on the Hogan Stand while Brosnan's clubmate Colm Cooper lifted the other. And much, much later that day, Jack O'Connor realised that the last thing he'd told his squad after their team meeting the night before was to turn their phones off and to keep them off until after the game.

All was well that ended well, so. Or maybe not. To this day, the theory that O'Connor played favourites in his All Ireland final selection gets plenty of traction, around Brosnan's home town of Killarney especially. It's not the sole reason he's brought out a book this week but it's of a piece with one of the themes that run through Keys To The Kingdom, that of a man who's found himself with more to explain than a double All Ireland-winning manager should necessarily expect to. Or more to prove, at any rate.

"Some people, " he says, "would have thought that I pulled a stroke [in selecting O'Sullivan]. But could anybody seriously say that after all the trauma we'd been through, all the highs and lows, that I'd in any way jeopardise our chances of winning an All Ireland by picking a fella just because he was from my own club?"

Maybe not, but you know some people thought that.

"I do and I say it in the book. But sure those are people looking from the outside and they don't know the situation at all. The easy thing to do would have been to pick Eoin. But would it have been fair on either of them to pick a team that wasn't what we thought was the best for that particular situation? Not at all it wouldn't.

"Plus, on top of that, the most important people in all of this are the players. If the rest of the squad had felt that picking Declan O'Sullivan was going to jeopardise our chances of winning an All Ireland, I couldn't have carried it with them. But they had no problem with it. If you were on the inside track, it wasn't as dramatic or as huge a risk as people on the outside thought it was."

Still, it goes to show. They do things differently down there. When some of his players took a copy of the Sunday Wo r ld to training last May and laughed that he'd been made national favourite for the sack - and this after winning the league, no less - it was just another of those surreal vignettes in the life of a Kerry manager. Or maybe just in the life of this particular Kerry manager, one who always felt he had to jump twice as high just to be let breathe the same air as the anointed.

His book has come out and been serialised and it's bracing and it's honest and always, always interesting and yet for the whole week he's had to walk around with the collar of his coat turned up against the elements.

Some of the local press have had a cut and there was, as he might say himself, a bit of ruaille buaille on Radio Kerry early in the week - some of it over content, some of it over the timing of the release. Then he had the whole payment bother to clear up on Thursday, himself and county board chairman Se�n Walsh backtracking with the speed of safari tourists who've just seen a lion look at them askance.

Some of it has drained him; some of it has just made him laugh.

"I saw some fella described it as a kiss-and-tell, " he says. "Like, kiss who?

Tell what? There's always a bit of aggravation around dressing rooms - how can you have 30 players, a backroom team and all the rest together for eight or nine months of a year without it? At the end of the day, you have arguments and fights and you clear the air and you move on. I'm not spilling out any state secrets by putting all that in a book, I don't think.

"Sure of course I was aware that there'd be some repercussions once the book came out but where do you draw the line? What do you put in and what do you leave out? There was no point doing it if it wasn't going to be done right. That'd be the way I'd always operate and maybe I'm a little bit too open for my own good at times. But that was the way I managed and it was the way I set out to do this. Of course it's going to be a bit uncomfortable for me for a while but sure that's life, you know?"

Anyway, discomfort is a feeling he's become fairly well accustomed to over the past three years. The middle of last summer, in the doldrum days after Kerry lost the Munster final replay to Cork, was about as bad as it could get. He found himself in idle moments wondering if a clean sweep of league, Munster and All Ireland the previous year and another league added since shouldn't entitle him to a bit of breathing space from the Kerry public.

"But then we get beaten in a Munster final after a replay and all of a sudden, flak starts flying from everywhere. There was stuff in the media about splits in the camp and that was tough going at the time, there's no point saying otherwise.

There was huge flak flying for some reason and it was almost like some of it was orchestrated because it was coming from all angles. It was obvious that some people didn't like my face down there. It was fairly obvious."

P�id� wasn't wrong way back when, so? "He wasn't wrong. He probably used the wrong words but I could certainly see where he was coming from.

I probably said a few things about the supporters last year that were maybe a bit rough on them but I suppose you get away with it if you win. Kerry have probably won too much for their own good. Every team is going to be judged against the four-in-a-row team and every manager against Dwyer. That's the position the supporters are coming from.

"But I don't think people on the outside have any idea of what goes into winning an All Ireland. I think they have no idea at all. Funny enough, I have this idea in my head that if you go back through the teams that have won All Irelands in the last few years, there's been a lot of trauma and a lot of difficulties along the way. It's as if you're being tested to the limit all the time and what it comes down to in the end is who's the last man standing, you know? Jesus, if you go through all the stuff that happened to us last year between injuries, suspensions, the Gooch's dad dying, all the racket with the supporters getting on our back - a lot of quare stuff happened. It's as if all these obstacles were put in front of us and someone was testing us. It was like, 'Can you jump this hurdle? You can? Okay, now jump this one and this one and this one.'

"And I often feel that people who give up can find out afterwards that they were within a pinch of cracking it.

Just that little bit more and they would have cracked it. We could easily have given up after the Munster final. But hey presto, we weren't far away from cracking as it turned out.

"And because we kept jumping each hurdle that was put in front of us, we were left standing in the end. But sure, all people on the outside see is an All Ireland."

The book, then, is an attempt to let those on the outside in. To explain a few things, beam light into a few dark corners, let the air out of a few myths and put a few legends to rest. To say there was a bit of collateral damage along the way would be to imply he went to war.

He didn't. He just brought a book, is all.

"All I was trying to do was to honestly show some of the insecurities that I felt in a pressurised job. I didn't set out with any agenda to get my place in history or anything like that. I wanted to give people an inside look at the range of emotions you go through trying to do that job. All the insecurities and fears that go into it are what I wanted to get across. I certainly wasn't bullet-proof last summer. There were times when I sat down and said to myself, 'Jesus, can I actually do this job?' But I could have lied and told people I knew we were going to win it all along. Listen, after the Cork game, I didn't know where we were going. That's being totally honest."

Which is about as much as you can ask, really.

'Keys To The Kingdom' byJack O'Connor (Penguin, �21.99) is in shops now