By John Harrington

One of the most unexpected sub-plots of last year’s All-Ireland Championship was Tommy Walsh’s third-coming as a Kerry footballer.

Young Footballer of the Year in 2009 when he helped Kerry win the All-Ireland title, he jetted to Australia to join AFL side St. Kilda.

After two years with St. Kilda he then moved to Sydney Swans where his career was effectively ended by a horror-hamstring injury that saw him rip the muscle off the bone.

Walsh returned to Ireland in 2014 and rejoined the Kerry panel in 2015, but he couldn’t recover his former powers and departed the Kerry panel again after the 2016 League, frustrated with a lack of game-time.

It was something of a surprise then when newly appointed Kerry manager Peter Keane recalled Walsh to the fold last season.

Even the most optimistic Kerry fan couldn’t have hoped that Walsh would go on to make the positive contribution he subsequently did, particularly in the drawn All-Ireland Final against Dublin when he introduction from the bench was a real game-changer.

It turns out that even Walsh himself was convinced his days as a Kerry footballer were over.

After departing the panel in 2016 he hardly played even any club football in 2017 because he kept pulling that same hamstring he’d injured so badly in Australia.

He had no real ambition to wear the Kerry jersey by then, so admits it was a shock when Peter Keane phone him to issue the invite.

“Ah it was (a shock), yeah,” said Walsh yesterday at the launch of Lidl Comórtas Peile Páidi Ó Sé 2020. “I kind of put that to bed, really. I was happy, like. I was living my life.

“I have a lot of other interests besides football and I was doing different things. I was able to go away at weekends in the summer which obviously I can't do now. I was living my life and getting on with it.

“But, then, when that opportunity came up, and a lot of people say you're a long time retired, so I think it would have been something, looking back, where I would have said 'why didn't I go in and just give it another shot and see what comes of it'. And, look, there was less pressure obviously.

“A lot of people probably thought that nothing would have happened. I said I'd go in, give it 12 months, and, if it worked, great, and, if not, then at least I'd know then that the body just wasn't up to it.”

When he looks back on his second coming as a Kerry footballer in 2015 and 2016, it’s with some regret that the then manager Eamonn Fitzmaurice didn’t give him more playing time.

There are no hard feelings though, he knows it was nothing personal, that Fitzmaurice was simply doing what he felt was best for the Kerry team.

He admits too he probably put too much pressure on himself and didn’t perform to the level he felt he was capable of.

Readjusting to the highest level of inter-county football after five years away from the sport was also a more difficult challenge that he anticipated.

“Yeh, probably,” said Walsh. “I think the hardest thing was that when you were a full-time athlete that’s literally all you are doing.

“You are going in in the morning and getting ready for a session. Afterwards you have the afternoon to recover or whatever else.

“Whereas I was living in Cork at the time, I was driving down for training, getting out of a car, trying to get through the session – I’d obviously had a significant injury before.

“Back in the car afterwards, back to Cork, get up the next day you are trying to do your gym in the morning, in the evening, so it took me a long time to get used to that.

“So while it’s not professional and you’re probably not training as hard, it is harder because there are so many more balls in the air.

“In terms of the game itself, there were a lot more bodies back, it probably turned into much more of a running game.

“So there certainly were changes, but that’s just natural, the game changes all the time and has changed again now from what it was back then, five years ago.”

One of the latest changes – the introduction of the advanced mark – should bring about a tactical shift that will make Walsh an even more essential member of the Kerry panel this year.

His fielding on the edge of the square gave Kerry a different dimension whenever they utilised him there, and with a mark now awarded to players who field a pass kicked more than 20 metres from on or outside the 45-metre line, the potential for Walsh to cause some serious damage to defences is obvious.

“Yeah, hopefully,” he said. “I suppose I would see ball winning as one of my strengths.

“It's entirely how the team play, we have good kickers as well, if the boys are able to find me I'll get my hands on a few. I'll always give myself a chance of taking it.

“You have to turn around then and kick it over the bar which, I'm not a free-taker, so that's something I'll have to get used to if I am able to take a couple of marks.

“The mark won’t necessarily mean I’m going to start. I still have to do all the other things.

“Obviously a forward is going to have a lot of defensive duties as well so I have to get all of those things right.

“There’s a lot of guys in there that are good above their head also, they’re all pushing for places so it’s just trying to do the right thing for the team, play as well as I can and see where that takes me then in the summer.”

Not many teams invested a lot of time in shaping their tactics around the advanced mark when it was trialled in last year’s League because it wouldn’t become a playing rule until the 2020 Championship if passed by Congress.

Now that it is a factor for the foreseeable future, every team will have to give a lot of consideration to how they use it to their benefit, and conversely stymie the opposition’s strategic approach to it.

“I think it will be interesting to see how teams adapt to it,” said Walsh.

“It isn't just necessarily a guy standing inside in the square and a ball being hoofed in.

“There's different types of runs that you can kind of make to take a mark, you're more running at the ball to try to take away the time for it to bounce, rather than running wide and it bouncing into you.

“Probably guys that have played International Rules might be a bit more used to it and you might see them come to the fore early on maybe.

“I think as the year goes on teams will get used to it. I think it will be a good thing. I think fielding is a really strong feature of our game, it's probably been lost maybe over the last decade.

“I think with this it might encourage teams to start kicking again. I think a lot of people probably had their reservations about the midfield mark as well but I think that's been good for the game.

“You're seeing a lot more fielding out the field than you would previously. It was probably a strong feature of the All-Ireland final actually.

“David Moran, Jack Barry, Brian Howard took a great one under the stand. I think you might start seeing more of that now.”

Critics of the new advanced mark believe that Gaelic Football is in danger of becoming a poor man’s AFL by introducing rules that are a central part of the Australian game, but Walsh doesn’t agree.

In fact, he believes there are a number of other AFL rules and regulations that could improve Gaelic Football even further.

“I think the 50-metre rule is a good idea,” said Walsh. “I think you’d see far less back-chat. You’d see far less cynical play.

“If a guy is messing around at the middle of the field, throwing the ball away, if it’s brought up in front of the goals it’ll cut it out instantly.

“I think they’ve a rule where if I foul you when I have the ball, I have to give the ball straight back to you.

“Now we see guys holding onto the ball and it actually causes scraps because guys are coming in slapping guys, pushing them, whereas if you just have to return the ball or it’s 50 metres guys will just throw it back because otherwise it’s a free in front of the goals. I think that’s a good one from a discipline point of view.

“I think they should take the time off the referees. I think it should be done like the ladies football where there’s a hooter. I think the referee has enough to be doing rather than trying to watch the time as well. I think there should be a time-keeper.

“The Australian rules have seven guys on the field, they have three referees, four umpires and we’ve only one referee.

“I think two referees is something that certainly at inter-county level should be looked at.

“You can’t see everything and with all the different things that are going on, they’re always going to have such a tough job and when they’re trying to decide whether it’s a foul, a black card, red card, a mark and then do the time as well, I think they’ve enough to be doing.

“If they have that extra support, the time is away from them, another referee on the field, I think it’d make their job an awful lot easier.

Walsh is clearly a deep thinker on the game, as was shown in last year’s All-Ireland Final replay when he had the presence of mind in to ask referee David Gough whether he could ‘line-out lift’ David Moran to better help him catch Dean Rock’s late free if it was on its way over the bar.

It wasn’t something he dreamed up there and then. It was a scenario he’d run through in his mind previously, which tells you a lot about his approach to the game.

As an innovator himself, he could appreciate Dublin’s tactics in the closing minutes of the drawn All-Ireland Final when they effectively played without a goal-keeper to compensate for the fact the had a numerical disadvantage out the field after Jonny Cooper’s dismissal.

Stephen Cluxton left his goal to man-mark Walsh, which allowed Dublin to push men forward and pressurise ball higher up the field.

“I actually don’t know is it something they would have even practiced I think it was just natural and they were pushing up and the keeper came out,” says Walsh.

“If you think about it is a good idea, I know the goals are open but it would have been a tough kick to score goal from where we were.

“I didn’t think much at the time but I thought it was a good idea James McCarthy was on me he pushed up on to a guy who was free around the 45 he turned around and roared at Cluxton and out he came.

“I suppose If you had your time again and realised that was a tactic they were going to use you might have tried to kick it to that one on one, the guy Cluxton would have been marking, but we didn’t so…”

Kerry will get another chance to measure themselves against Dublin when the two teams go head to head in what should be an absorbing curtain-raiser for Division 1 of the Allianz Football League on Saturday night in Croke Park.

The common assumption is that a talented young Kerry team will have learned a lot from last year's two All-Ireland Finals and are well positioned to knock Dublin from their lofty perch in 2020.

Walsh is around long enough to know you should never take anything for granted in sport, but he's hopeful at least that some valuable lessons have been learned from last year.

"You just have to improve, last year was a huge learning curve for a lot of guys," he said.

"They have to take that on board, we all do even the older guys like myself have to take stuff on board from last year and try and do things a bit better because ultimately while we were very very close we still fell short.

"There’s a big difference between drawing with Dublin and beating them. Dublin aren’t the only team, theres a lot of teams on that level below Dublin with us that are trying to get there too.

"We are woking hard at the moment, we haven’t a lot done because the lads were away on holidays are just back and with Sigerson and club action in Kerry goes deep into December it is probably hard to get that base but we are working hard at the moment and we’ll take each game in the league as it comes and hopefully come summer we will have added a few strings to our bow and go one step further."

If they do go one step further, you get the feeling a rejuventated Tommy Walsh will be one of those strings Kerry manager Peter Keane gets a good tune out of in 2020.