David Clifford insists the race for Sam Maguire is wide open this year and there are nine or 10 teams that could knock Kerry off their perch.

The King­dom are strong favour­ites to retain the All-Ire­land title but the reign­ing Footballer of the Year feels that recent shock res­ults — such as Down beat­ing Donegal and West­meath defeat­ing Meath— prove that the new rules have become a lev­el­ler in Gaelic foot­ball.

And David Clif­ford feels the change in cham­pi­on­ship struc­ture, mov­ing from a group phase to a qual­i­fier­type sys­tem, where teams have less mar­gin for error, will feed into the uncer­tainty and mean there could be more shocks as the sum­mer pro­gresses.

‘If I said seven [teams could win All-Ire­land) last year, there must be nine or ten this year, because a couple more teams that have come into it. I think there isn’t even much of a dif­fer­ence now between Divi­sion 1 and 2, so there’s a huge vari­ety of teams who can chal­lenge,’ the 26-yearold said.

‘I think the struc­tures will feed into that. Before, you got beaten early in the pro­vin­cial and then you could be out after one back.’

As much as he has mastered Gaelic foot­ball, Clif­ford never gives the impres­sion of being obsessed by the game. He has plenty of other sport­ing interests includ­ing darts and Celtic foot­ball club.

The last few days, he has been engrossed in the action from the Cru­cible.

In an example of game recog­nising game, Ron­nie O’Sul­li­van is his favour­ite snooker player although he likes John Hig­gins too, so didn’t mind the Scot win­ning their titanic battle on Monday.

‘Yeah, Ron­nie, was my tip to win it so I don’t know. Yeah, it was an inter­est­ing one. I’m prob­ably an equal John Hig­gins fan than I am a Ron­nie fan, so I wasn’t too dis­ap­poin­ted either way.’

O’Sul­li­van’s quest for an eighth world title, to eclipse Stephen Hendry in the record books, goes on. When Clif­ford is asked about his own per­sonal mile­stones — he has already bagged four Foot­baller of the Year awards and two Celtic Crosses — he shrugs and says he hasn’t given it too much thought.

‘As my career has gone on, I tried to not set tar­gets for any­thing really, because I found maybe when I was doing that, I was, let’s say take a League cam­paign, I was say­ing to myself, ‘Right, we’ll just get through this League, then we’ll just get through the Mun­ster Cham­pi­on­ship, we’ll get back to the games in Croke Park.’

‘You were kind of just wish­ing away the days. I was find­ing myself that, “Jesus, I’m just after wish­ing away six weeks there,” so, I don’t really set any tar­gets for any­thing to be hon­est, I just kind of go with it day by day, as cliched as that sounds. But that’s kind of the way I approach it.’

Jack O’Con­nor has returned to the helm, with Kieran Don­aghy as part of his back­room team, intent on lead­ing Kerry to their 40th All-Ire­land and suc­cess­fully defend­ing the Sam Maguire, which he has yet to do as King­dom boss.

Did he ever fear that he would leave on a high after last year?

‘I don’t know, that’s a tricky one,’ Clif­ford says. ‘Did I think he was going to go? I don’t know, really. I sup­pose after you’re suc­cess­ful, it can kind of go either way. Some people can be happy with their lot, or it can be easy to go again.

‘So, yeah, I don’t know. I actu­ally had no idea, really, but obvi­ously we were delighted that he decided to stay. ‘He has built up so much exper­i­ence that he can… In most situ­ations that hap­pen, he’s prob­ably dealt with them in the past, so he’s got some kind of story or way of deal­ing with them. I think that’s prob­ably his biggest strength.’

Clif­ford has been car­ry­ing the hopes of Kerry for nine sea­sons as a senior foot­baller. Does it ever feel over­whelm­ing or too much? ‘No, I sup­pose I’m lucky in the job that I’m in and I’m lucky with my fam­ily that my routines are set in place, do you know what I mean?

‘I’m at school, I’m at home from four to six, I go to train­ing at half five, six, whatever. Do you know what I mean? I think it’s prob­ably ingrained in me and ingrained in every­one around me, that this is when he’s avail­able, this is when he’s not avail­able.’