And so, when we mention to a couple of people that we’re meeting Donncha, there’s a real sense of goodwill mixed with a tinge of concern as to how he may be. For so long he was part of Cork-Kerry, just as county football for so long was such a part of him. How he is faring, away from that dressing room, away from the buzz and anticipation of a big championship day? Many – most – players struggle their first year outside the bubble and cauldron. We’re glad to report that O’Connor isn’t one of them.

“I was a bit worried alright at the start of the year. ‘What am I going to do in my time?’ But playing with the club has taken care of that.”

Three times a week he joins a few clubmates making the hour-long commute from the city back to their homeplace of Ballydesmond and even from that vantage point of playing Division 4 county league, he can see the changes and benefits that have come with Kevin O’Donovan ascending to the role of county secretary. Whisper it but Cork football is getting its house in order.

In fairness, the way the county board has restructured the leagues has been great. In the past, teams were conceding games all the time. We could be in the same division as a predominantly hurling club from east Cork 80 miles away so they’d go ‘Erra, don’t bother going, we’ll concede that game.’ So you could end up playing just two or three league games a year when there’d be 10 teams in your group.

“Now if you concede two league games you’re automatically relegated. And they’ve shortened the league so it’s finished in July. So when you think there mightn’t be much happening, there’s always a league game coming up every two or three weeks. January to April went by without me even knowing it.

“I don’t know Kevin [O’Donovan] but it’s exciting what he’ll do in the long run. Because already he’s improved things. For years there, there was no relegation, or if a club won their first round [championship match], that was them safe for the year. You can’t win one game and be happy with that. You have to get that out of a club’s mentality.”

He’s playing with more than just Ballydesmond. He’s also still lining out for Duhallow, kicking five points from play for them against Imokilly and another six points against CIT to help them progress to the next series of the senior county championship. He still lines out for his divisional side because he still believes in how they and a wily veteran or two can help develop younger players.

“I swear by them [the divisional sides]. For how it allows lads from junior or intermediate clubs play a senior standard of football.

“I remember when I started out at 18, 19 years of age, I was playing in the full-forward line alongside [Cork senior player] Mark O’Sullivan, up against the likes of Beara and Skibb in championship. I was a fierce quiet lad, and you’d have the odd bit of shouting and roaring from your markers.

“Next thing Mark would come over and hop a belt of a shoulder off one of them and be telling me, ‘They’re only doing that to upset you. The next time you get it, take them on. Come on, I’ll give you a hand.’ By my second year I was there, ‘Yeah, I’m well able for this.’”

Not that his progress from there was strictly linear or that his tentativeness didn’t dissipate straight away. It’s now part of Cork football folklore how he was invited to train with the senior panel only to see Ciaran O’Sullivan get out of the car next to his, and then Joe Kavanagh follow him into to the dressing room.

“I looked at these fellas and said to myself, ‘F***it, what I’m doing here? After they ran onto the pitch, I turned on the car and drove away.”

That lack of confidence — rooted in not even being able to secure a starting spot with the U21s at the time — would soon transform into an anger with himself and a determination to improve and back

himself. He’ll admit he didn’t know what hard training was. He was prone to enjoying himself a bit too much. So he began addressing that. But one thing he always had was the football.

As a kid living on the county bounds, he only ever supported Cork but often followed Kerry, as in he’d often accompany his father Dan, born on the Kerry side of Ballydesmond, to league games in Killarney and even the 1997 All-Ireland semi-final against Cavan. When he’d be out playing and practising in the back garden or just across the road in the club field, he usually envisaged himself being Colin Corkery or Joe Kavanagh, but he’ll admit, he also used to model himself on Maurice Fitzgerald.

“Sure you couldn’t help but admire him, imitate him. Two-footed. Fine fielder of the ball. I don’t know if Kerry concentrate on it a lot more than we do but I think it’s something that Cork, especially at underage, need to starting coaching and emphasising more. Worry less about trying to win a lot of underage games and develop more players with left and right.

“When we’d be out the garden or down in the club with my father, he’d always be on to us about being able to kick with both feet and being able to field the ball. And a lot of us with those Ballydesmond teams were able to use both because we’d practised it in training.

“A lot of training now seems to have gone away from that. At inter-county level, it’s a results business and coaches don’t feel like they have time to be working on a fella’s weaker side. You have to do it yourself. And it helped me a lot that I could already do it. Because if you’re a corner-forward today and you can’t even solo with your weaker foot, then you will be found out pretty easy. The likes of Kerry, Dublin and Mayo will have spotted it a mile away.”

When O’Connor eventually broke onto the Cork team, it coincided with a time when they went from also-rans to serious contenders. In his first season on the team he’d win a Munster final, scoring two points from play against Kerry. The following year he’d score a goal against them down in Killarney and face them again in the All-Ireland final. Soon though he and his teammates were on strike.

I remember in one of those early meetings, one fella said, ‘Look, lads, you’ve got to realise there might be no football for us this year.’ That was the first time it dawned on me, ‘Oh shit, this is serious.’ I was just a young fella.

"No football for the year? No way could I do that. My firstinstinct if someone had offered me the chance to play with someone else was, ‘Yeah, absolutely, I’ll join ye.’

“But then I realised these guys really wanted to go the distance. They didn’t just want to play. They wanted to win and give themselves the best possible chance to do so.”

Over the years he’d come to appreciate all the more just how dedicated those men were to Cork and winning and each other. Canty and the glare he might shoot at you. Nicholas. Lynch. Quirke. And another

unheralded hero.

He laughs recalling one camp in Glengarriff, the lot of them in holiday homes. One evening O’Connor’s house, with Pearse O’Neill particularly to the fore – “Pearse was a guy you’d always want on your team, he was suitably reckless, whatever the task” — decided to raid their neighbours with water guns, taking Tomás Clancy from Fermoy hostage in the process, tying him to a patio table, his eyes stinging from the washing-up liquid sprayed on him. Initially they had to withstand a wave or two of hostile fire but having weathered it and bolted the doors, the storm subsided, the enemy having seemingly retreated and abandoned the rescue mission.

“We thought it was all over, that the boys had all gone to bed. We were going to leave Tom go, only I needed to go to the jacks first. Next thing I heard this noise and finished in the jacks quick. And then I turned around and there was…”

A bird? A plane? No, it was more Batman or Jason Bourne. Or, to be precise, Alan O’Connor. Somehow he’d parachuted in through the skylight before proceeding to thump all around him — “I didn’t even offer any resistance,” says Donncha, offering up his hands. “We had it coming to us” — open the door for his seething housemates to barge in and free Clancy.

“The next morning we still couldn’t figure out how he got in so we went all around the house. He’d climbed on top of a tree and jumped onto the roof. He could easily have broken his leg! We could all have been hauled in front of management.”

It’s a memory like that he recalls as easily as all the big wins in the Park or Croker and the time they beat the Dubs in 2010 (“You could actually feel the vibration coming from the Hill walking past it in the parade”). Even the losses are now looked back on with some fondness. Because again, the likes of O’Connor was there for them. They were together.

“I found that huge. In 2007 I was still young enough but it gave me a chance to meet the likes of Anthony Lynch and Nicholas Murphy in a different setting than just seeing them in a pair of shorts. It was good to be out with them and have the crack and everyone feeling the same pain. Because you didn’t want to be with anyone else. You didn’t want to be talking to your uncle about the match, or even your brothers. You just wanted to be with the lads that you lost with.”

In time, the losing would become more common and in truth, less anguished. Standards dropped, on and off the field. Whereas in the old days no win or loss short of September was celebrated or mourned for longer than one night on the town, in later years that could stretch to two-day benders, even three. Not every lad always ate the right thing, worked on their weak side, did their 20 minutes in the gym for the day.

“What used to really irritate me was you’d be doing a fitness test and fellas would pull up two or three yards away from the line. I remember in Conor’s time, the likes of [sport psychologist] Kevin Clancy had it drilled into us — go all the way to the line. Sprint past the line. Doesn’t matter if you’re 20 yards behind him. Don’t be coming up short. In your runs. In your work and life outside football. But some lads [in later years] went away from that.

“I look back now on certain things that happened through the years that would not have happened in [Counihan’s time]. Some of us as players maybe tried to challenge it but we didn’t challenge it enough and let it go, thinking it might sort itself out. But the fact it was let go once or twice, sure that meant your culture was slipping straight away.

“It’s something that annoyed me. Looking back on it, fuck it, I had nothing to lose by challenging it. Why didn’t I challenge it a bit more?”

Well, why didn’t he challenge it a bit more? He pauses. While he was a leader by example and not afraid to confront moments — do-or-die penalties, chase down seemingly irretrievable deficits — he wasn’t necessarily a vocal leader comfortable with confronting teammates.

“Maybe I was afraid to upset the panel. Like, you don’t want to fight in there. But sometimes if there’s a big argument and two or three fellas mightn’t be talking to one another, so be it. I mean, they’re all there for the one reason and that’s for Cork to be as competitive as possible, winning games. If I don’t get on with a fella, it doesn’t mean I’m going to try any less.

“It doesn’t eat me up too much, but whenever you talk about the culture and stuff, I then think to myself, ‘God, I had the opportunity a few times to take fellas on about it and I didn’t do it enough.’ So I’m disappointed with that.”

What he doesn’t regret though is that he stayed playing as long as he did.

In a way he was a reminder, a bastion, of Cork defiance and optimism. In four of his first five Munster Championship clashes against Kerry in Páirc Uí Chaoimh, Cork won, and the year they didn’t, they ended up winning the All-Ireland. Even in Killarney where they wouldn’t emerge with a win, they’d invariably rattle the old enemy, with O’Connor scoring goals down there in 2007, 2011 and again in 2015 on what should have been — and probably still was — Brian Cuthbert’s finest day.

Coincidence or not, Cork’s worst days in Munster, like the 2014 humiliation to Kerry in the last game played in the old Páirc, the 2018 drubbing in the first game in the new Páirc, occurred when O’Connor couldn’t play through injury or, like Thurles 2016 and Killarney 2017 when he was only brought on after half-time.

Yet invariably there’d be some rally in the qualifiers, with O’Connor leading the charge of their light brigade. In 2014 he’d come off the bench in an All-Ireland quarter-final and frighten Mayo to within an inch of their lives, blitzing them for 1-3. In 2016, he’d be restored to the starting lineup in a qualifier up in Croke Park against Donegal and strike for two sweet first-half points in a respectable three-point defeat. Then in a 2017 qualifier he’d again plunder Mayo for six points in another one-point defeat to the Connacht side. Last year against Tyrone though, not even he could summon a comeback.

“Every year I’d find the appetite. That feeling for championship and the build up to it. Two years ago I was really thinking of packing it in but then we had a right crack at Mayo and they got to the All-Ireland final, so I was saying to myself, ‘Listen, you finished the year really strong.

A couple of things here and there could change it and get us back to where we should be.’ It didn’t work out that way but it’s not something I regret. I’m glad I gave it a go.

He remains good friends with players in Ronan McCarthy’s current panel, especially the likes of Ian Maguire and Brian Hurley (“I’m so delighted for Brian, the way he’s kept at it. Like, that injury even finished Paul O’Connell. But Hurley wasn’t taking no for an answer”).

It’s not his manner to pry for information as to how life now is in the circle and rarely do his buddies inside volunteer it. But the odd time it’s naturally come up in conversation and O’Connor has been encouraged by what he’s hearing.

“Earlier in the year, maybe after the Meath game [when Cork were still winless after four league matches], you’d have people saying to you, ‘Aren’t you lucky you retired? God, it must be tough being a Cork footballer now.’

“But Ian [Maguire] was telling me, ‘It’s actually strange, because it’s so enjoyable in there. We’ve a really good crew in there, the younger lads are really solid lads and the training is good.’ Although a lot of people on the outside were rubbishing the setup, he was pretty happy with how they were going about things in there. The culture has changed and is getting back to where it was.”

And so, he’ll head down to the Páirc tonight, the same spot where 10 years ago this month he scored a game-clinching penalty in the first-ever Cork-Kerry championship game played on a Saturday evening, the normal lark now.

Funny, he never missed a penalty for Cork – took a point against Roscommon in a quarter-final one year and buried the rest to the net. Yet funny enough too, no one had ever raised it with him up until a fortnight ago when he was asked what was his secret. Simple, he said, pick your spot and don’t change it.

“That next weekend we played Castletownbere in a league game and we were three up when we won a penalty. At the last second then I changed my mind where to put it. Don’t know why. Missed it. We ended up losing by three!”

But he’s smiling as he says it. Just as he’s happy to have ever walked back into a Cork dressing room and still be togging out in Ballydesmond’s. Donncha’s doing fine, thanks.