The cards are stacked against the GAA in AFL’s favour

The Mark O’Connor affair highlights AFL’s contempt for Irish cousins, who simply roll over

‘IT IS NOW A ONE-SIDED RELATIONSHIP AND GAA IS ITS PLAYTHING’

WE HAVE no idea if Mark O’Connor is contrite by nature, but we are willing to have a bet that the apology he made this week was one he could never have envisaged scripting in his young life.

After all, while there are things in life to feel sorry about, one of them is surely not togging out for your club and helping them reach a county semi-final.

And O’Connor more than played his part for Dingle three weeks ago, where he impressed in his marking job on Austin Stacks’ danger man Kieran Donaghy, before his afternoon was prematurely brought to an end with a black card midway through the second half.

Not that anyone in Kerry would be remotely surprised.

O’Connor is arguably – even more than David Clifford – the golden boy of football’s most prolific production line.

As a teenager, he played in four All-Ireland finals inside 16 months – two Hogan Cup finals with Pobalscoil Chorca Dhuibhne and two AllIreland minor deciders – and was named man-of-the match in three of them.

He was almost too good to be true, and he was certainly too good to hold onto.

O’Connor was snapped up by the AFL’s Geelong Cats and he is such a precocious talent that he is almost certain to make it big over there – he made his senior debut within nine months of signing his rookie contract in October 2016.

You can take the view that Gaelic football is diminished as a sport when you lose someone who shines that brightly, but what you can’t deny is that it is heart-warming to see one of our own make a life, and hopefully a rewarding career, off the back of his talent.

Yet the comments of his AFL employers this week, unhappy that O’Connor had played a game of ball for the club that nurtured and nourished that talent in the first instance, jarred for a reason.

‘To Mark’s credit, he acknowledged Geelong was his main priority and that he wouldn’t do it again

‘It was down to the risk of injury which would then compromise his ability to play and train for Geelong.

‘We told him we cannot provide permission for you to play in further Gaelic football games as it’s a breach to his contract,’ Geelong’s head of football Simon Lloyd told AFL.com.

Of course, you can argue that Geelong is right protecting its asset. Much as the late Dave Sexton, as he watched Kevin Moran hobble through the door at Manchester United with a shredded hamstring and a bandaged head after the 1978 All-Ireland final, probably wished he had done had he been blessed with the wisdom of hindsight.

Legend has it he enquired of Moran if he had gone over to Dublin to play ball or to fight in a war, with the latter, most likely with Páidí Ó Sé still on his mind, responding, ‘Sure, a bit of both’.

But something lost on those who can’t figure out why some GAA folk get so exercised by losing talent to the AFL, in a way that never articulates the same distress when players are lost to professional soccer or rugby, is down to a couple of reasons.

The first is that GAA talent lost to the latter two codes is down to the promise individuals have showed as a result of skills honed on a soccer or rugby pitch. The AFL shop direct. That, though, is not the issue which grates. Whereas the GAA view and treat soccer and rugby as competing codes, its relationship with the AFL is as more of an affiliate than a competitor.

It is a relationship sugared by the notion that both are in the same business, promoting indigenous sports which are of immense cultural value to their respective nations.

But those are just soft words offered up for consumption along with the cocktail sausages every time the latest International Rules Series is launched to celebrate the union of a hard-nosed professional sport and an amateur communitybased one.

It is a one-sided relationship, where the AFL ask the GAA to jump, and the GAA’s response is to enquire what level of elevation will satisfy.

If you haven’t noticed – and we are betting that you haven’t – we are currently on one of our mini-breaks because a suitable venue to host the event in New York could not be sourced, but when the AFL feels the urge it will be back on.

After all, it does no harm to a professional sport to have an international dimension, especially when it is eyeballing an expansion into what it sees as a lucrative American market.

And the GAA is its plaything – there is a cruder term for it – and it will answer the call even though in so doing it will discommode clubs right at the business end of their season.

The sight of Michael Murphy playing for Ireland on a Saturday and for his club in a county final 24 hours later in 2013 – a scenario replicated by Longford’s Michael Quinn two years later – makes a mockery of the notion that this is an equal relationship.

And when the AFL is not showcas-

ing itself for free on the GAA’s back, it is cherry-picking the best talent from what is, in effect, a free academy system.

If the AFL were truly our brothers in indigenous arms, they would recognise that there should be some form of payback for not having to dig into their wallets for taking the best and brightest.

That compensation might manifest itself in allowing contracted GAA players line out with their own people in the off-season, rather than having to apologise for doing so.

And in the absence of that happening then surely the GAA, for all kinds of other reasons as well as a crammed fixture schedule, should advise the AFL that they would like to make the current International Rules break a permanent one.

Of course, in doing so, they should not forget to apologise.

After all, the Aussies like it when you say sorry.