For all the hullabaloo surrounding Seán O’Brien and whether he was inside the square when scoring one of Kerry’s goals in their All-Ireland semi-final win over Dublin, James Costello diverts the conversation in a different direction. The Kerry selector wasn’t one bit surprised to see O’Brien in that area of the pitch to begin with.Costello has known all about what he calls O’Brien’s “football IQ” since 2019, when he was Kerry minor football manager and O’Brien was better known as a wing back.“We had a funny year with the minors because we had six or seven midfielders and we’d no defenders,” Costello recalls. “So we actually played Seán wing back because he was adaptable from playing a lot of basketball. And then he went on and I think he played three years as a wing back under-20.“And he developed his position in the senior team as a back. He still plays a huge amount of basketball, and just that adaptability and football IQ has allowed him to play in different positions. His game intelligence would be the thing that would strike you about Seán.”When Kerry manager Jack O’Connor made the decision to shake up his backroom team after the 2024 All-Ireland semi-final loss to Armagh, he ran through his contacts and picked out Costello, the Kerry minor football manager for four seasons from 2019 to 2022.Part of Costello’s task was to help identify some fresh faces – and one of those to emerge last year was O’Brien, from the Beaufort club in Killarney. By then, however, he was hardly recognisable from the minor player Costello had known before.“I’d had no contact with him in between and he was incredibly quiet as a minor,“ he says. ”So just to see the confidence and the bit of authority he’s developed over the years, and kind of self-belief, was the thing that struck me when I came back in.“I think the big thing, last year in particular, there was a kind of trend out there about midfielders posting up inside in the small square, and then teams were starting to drop off him. And again from the basketball, Seán was able to recognise that. He’s also well capable of kicking a point if he finds himself free. And he’s happy enough to positionally move himself around.“But I think you need a huge amount of football IQ to play the new game. Every different phase of the play is different. Your ability to assess what’s happening and where you need to be in the pitch is really, really important, and it’s a strength of both Seán and Mark (O’Shea, Kerry’s other midfielder).Kerry selector James Costello in Killarney during the team's preparations for Sunday's All-Ireland SFC final against Mayo at Croke Park. Photograph: Bryan Keane/Inpho “So I think most teams will have somebody in around there, just being a nuisance for that purpose and Seán’s very effective because he’s a big guy and he has a good jump.”Keeping players fresh throughout the demands of the compacted championship season, on top of the new playing rules, is proving increasingly critical to any success. Costello credits O’Connor’s vast experience in ensuring Kerry come into Sunday’s All-Ireland showdown against Mayo in peak condition.There were some worrying moments, not least when Donegal took Kerry apart in the league final back on March 29th, and again in the championship on May 23rd.“Of course, we were worried about that game – Donegal are an exceptional team,” Costello says. “No one holds them in higher regard than we do, but we were after coming off a game up in Armagh the week before where our physical numbers, GPS and all that, was at something we hadn’t hit all year.“We were tired and leggy and Donegal were really, really sharp. But it’s about timing a run, taking the learnings and we learned a huge amount that day. We tried to set up different ways defensively, we tried out a few things and then you fine-tune your game plan to attack the summer.“And you’d have to credit the boss (O’Connor). I thought he did a very good job of managing the whole group. He has a reference bank in his head of similar situations that he can call on to lead us through it.“We probably haven’t delivered a 70-minute performance all year and that’s something we’re aware of too. What I will say is our game management has been good this year. We found ways to win games. It’s all about staying alive. Nobody will care about quarter-finals or semi-finals. So, we found ways to win without hitting our A-game - as we like to call it – as much as we want.”Costello also credits O’Connor’s All-Ireland experience, with Sunday being his ninth final as Kerry manager.“The big thing you’d learn from him is, in the weeks leading up to a big game, it’s all about energy and freshness. He really wants the lads to go out and express themselves on the big day.”