Inside the past week two more of the brightest young stars in the GAA have either left an AFL club, or rejected their overtures.
The hunt for those one or two ‘difference makers’, from Ireland and elsewhere, will still go on, though, even if the numbers are well down on pre-Covid times.
Mark O’Connor’s recent success at Geelong has shown that they’re still out there in the GAA, but the world has changed markedly since he signed up in late 2016.
But Oisin Mullin’s decision to stay put and Mark Keane’s call to stay in Cork means there are now just 11 Irish players on the books of AFL sides.
They are Zach Tuohy and Mark O’Connor (Geelong), Colin O’Riordan and Barry O’Connor (Sydney), James Madden and Deividas Uosis (Brisbane), Darragh Joyce (St Kilda), Callum Browne (Great Western Sydney), Conor Nash and Fionn O’Hara (Hawthorn) and Cian McBride (Essendon).
Ultan Kelm (Fermanagh) has delayed a move to the AFL until next year due to a hip problem.
Just before the start of the Covid pandemic, in Spring 2020, the number of Irish players in the AFL had reached a record 18. Not only has that dropped by over a third, but very few of the 11 — bar Tuohy and O’Connor — are senior regulars or have a decent number of top-level games under their belt.
More could be on the way home at the end of this year.
The likes of O’Riordan, Madden, Nash and Joyce probably need to see significant senior game time in 2022 if they’re to continue on in the AFL.
No doubt Covid has played a role in the reduced numbers.
Armagh’s Ross McQuillan, Derry’s Conor Glass and McKenna all came home in 2020 — the year the pandemic started.
Keane, Stefan Okunbor (Kerry), Red Og Murphy and Luke Towey (both Sligo) and Anton Tohill (Derry) were in the latest wave of returnees.
Perhaps most significantly, AFL clubs shipped a multi-million dollar financial hit in the first year of the pandemic, which affected recruitment, rosters and coaching.
Towey has detailed how in 2020 — his first season — he was left with no development coach, or reserve league to bed himself in, due to Covid-related cutbacks.
Unsure of his future at the end of a two-year deal, he was looking at deferring his course in DCU for a third time.
Just as the lure of a full-time professional career draws players in, the pull of home, family and career is a strong one too, particularly in formative years and when the going gets tough.
This was, most likely exacerbated by Covid, with the possibility of friends and family visiting less likely.
Maybe, going to Australia just isn’t as exciting or appealing any more.
Hosting so-called ‘Combines,’ camps, where players are put through their paces, also costs money in a time of tighter
budgets.
On top of this, the International Rules series, which placed Aussie Rules front and centre for young players for a few weeks every couple of years, hasn’t been played since 2017 now.
Leinster, Munster and Connacht rugby are mining in traditional GAA areas too for players who don’t go to private schools.
No doubt the AFL will have found Conor McKenna’s decision to return home in the summer of 2020 the hardest one to get their heads around, and it was probably a significant blow to the
so-called ‘Irish experiment.’
McKenna gave up the most.
He’d put down the hard yards already and had a successful career in the AFL with Essendon Bombers — a lucrative contract.
The possibility of playing on towards his 30s and setting himself up for life was a real one.
And yet he gave it all up to return home — proof that an Irish player could up sticks at any stage, with years of investment by the club going by the wayside.
All-Ireland glory with Tyrone surely vindicated McKenna’s personal decision.
Mayo’s Mullin, the double young Footballer of the Year, who finally turned down a move to Geelong over the weekend, will look to achieve what McKenna did.
This probably figured highly in his thinking.
Mullin would have to have enjoyed some AFL career to surpass anything that winning an All-Ireland with Mayo would mean.
All Mayo jokes aside, the former is way more of a long shot than the latter too.
On the surface it appears Geelong have lost nothing in their pursuit of Mullin, as he never signed a contract, was paid or given an
apartment or car.
But plenty of the club’s energy and resources will have been invested in tracking and attempting to recruit the Kilmaine man.
It won’t put AFL clubs off, but it suggests the GAA, in some counties at least, may be able to compete with them and hold onto their top young talent.
Mullin’s scenario is similar to Tyrone’s Cathal McShane.
McShane had a sniff, going down to Australia to check out the Adelaide Crows set-up, before committing to Tyrone.
Now McShane has his All-Ireland title.
At the time Tyrone pulled out all the stops to keep him, with a job offer on the table, accepted.
You can imagine a clear pathway being mapped out for Mullin by a range of power brokers across Mayo GAA.
David Clifford was pursued but never went. Ciaran Kilkenny went for a few weeks. Bar Mark O’Connor in recent times, the players from the bigger counties have tended to stay at home.
Mark Keane faced a trickier call than Mullin.
He’d earned a contract extension, had put down three years with Collingwood and played five senior games.
But, the club confirmed he had battled homesickness throughout his time in Australia.
His Irish colleague, Anton Tohill, who signed at the same time as him, had left for home a few months earlier to pursue a
degree in medicine.
Tohill — son of Anthony — came on for Derry in their last two McKenna Cup games.
Maybe Keane wasn’t going back to Australia anyway, but winning the Munster junior hurling championship with his club, Ballygiblin, surely crystallised that decision in his mind.
And scoring that sensational winning goal against Kerry at the end of extra-time in the 2020 Munster football final will have given him a taste of what the future could hold in a Cork jersey.
It’s nowhere near as cut throat in the GAA as it is in a
professional sport like the AFL.
You’re not an outsider either, as well as coming in and trying to learn a new sport and competing against players who’ve trained with an oval ball all their lives.
Even that in itself is a bizarre concept, changing sport in your late teens or early 20s.
Bodies get broken up in both sports, but AFL careers average seven years, if you make it.
There are upsides, but there are also downsides, and the potential difficulties of coming home and starting all over again.
Ray Connellan (Westmeath) has spoken about those challenges.
Red Og Murphy has taken a year out of the Sligo set-up.
Jamie O’Reilly (Down) talked about the difficulty of motivating himself, moving from a professional set-up back to an
amateur one.
Tommy Walsh and Kevin Dyas picked up serious injuries.
There are plenty of challenges already for young people in their formative years before what must be a shocking step out of their comfort zones for some.
The pathway at home is the more straightforward, supported one, particularly in such
uncertain times.
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