Oval and Out
Colin O’Riordan packs his bags for Australia once again
COLIN O’RIORDAN returns to Sydney this week. It will be a wrench to leave Templemore. He has been home for more than a month and even had the privilege of celebrating his 23rd birthday with family and friends. But it hasn’t all been about seeing familiar faces and places.
Before flying back to Ireland in September, the Sydney Swans reminded him that the trip was partially a working holiday as he was given his pre-season fitness programme. The Swans’ season opener is still five months away but when they travel down to Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium to meet the Western Bulldogs on March 23, O’Riordan is determined to be part of the team. That’s why when he answered the phone last week, he was just in the door from a morning run.
Foundations were set this past season. For the second year in a row, he was named on the NEAFL (the AFL’s development league) Team of the Year, while in July he made his senior debut for Sydney Swans in a thrilling win over North Melbourne, collecting 19 possessions and making eight marks in the half-back role that Tadhg Kennelly once filled with aplomb. It was an accomplished debut and the first of three successive games that he played before a groin problem curtailed his progress.
‘I was pretty happy with how the year went. I set out at the start of the year to play senior football and to be able to tick that off and to say that I did it is pretty special,’ O’Riordan exclaims. ‘Making my debut is something I will never forget
‘It was a magic day, a special day. It was the pinnacle of my career so far. When you start out in your AFL career, the first aim is to make your debut. But it was just a steppingstone. I want to achieve much more. I am not happy just to say that I am an AFL player. I see my debut as a building-block for next year.’
The tendency in many team sports might be to take the spotlight off any youngster making their first appearance. But they do things differently in Aussie Rules. The coach calls the whole squad into the dressing-room and announces that there is going to be a debutant, which is just what Swans’ John Longmire did with O’Riordan days before their clash with North Melbourne. ‘Yeah, they make quite a big deal out of it in Australia when any player makes his debut. The coach called everyone into the room and announced that I was in the team. Everyone is standing around and starts cheering and chanting your name. ‘But the club do go out of their way to make the day feel as special as possible for you and your family. They flew my parents over for my debut, and they stayed for a couple of weeks. It was a great day and even better because we got the right result.’ Of course, Longmire and the Swans were all too aware of the eventful
journey that had brought the former Tipperary Under-21 captain to that point. He not only had to adapt to a new sport at 19, but his impressive maiden season with the club ended abruptly when he punctured his lung and broke a bone in his back in an NEAFL match in Darwin.
The punctured lung meant he was unable to fly so he set off on an extraordinary road trip with Swans’ player welfare manager Denis O’Carroll and a paramedic, heading down more than 4,000km of Australia’s Red Centre, much of it empty landscape. It took almost five days.
That setback only sharpened O’Riordan’s resolve to become a success. ‘I never stopped believing that I could make it at the highest level. When you get a bad injury like that, it just makes you more determined. They are part and parcel of this game, you can’t sit back and cry about them. You just have to overcome them.’
During his rehabilitation, the Swans gave O’Riordan a vote of confidence by extending his professional contract. ‘They showed massive faith in me at the time and I just wanted to repay them when I got the opportunity,’ he explains.
It has been a hard slog but walking out in Melbourne’s Etihad Stadium with his parents, Michael and Imelda, watching on, made it all worthwhile. And he singles out Kennelly’s influence as the most significant factor in him becoming an AFL player.
Some sections of the GAA fraternity have painted Kennelly as public enemy number one, as AFL clubs continue to poach some of the most promising talents in Gaelic Games. But O’Riordan gives the Kerryman, who is a coach with the Swans, a glowing reference.
‘I know he has picked up a bit of stick on this side of the world, but he has been a huge influence on me. His mentorship is the biggest reason why I made my AFL debut this year. Even in my first year, when I was suffering from a bit of homesickness, he took me under his wing. His leadership and mentorship since I came over here is something I will never forget and will always be grateful for.’
It has been a tetchy time in relations between the AFL and the grassroots of the GAA. When North Melbourne announced that they signed talented Sligo forward, Red Óg Murphy, it took the total of young GAA players joining the AFL this year to six. When the 2019 season starts, a record 14 Irish players will be on the books of various AFL clubs.
Such has been the extent of the recruitment drive that some highprofile GAA personalities are now wondering if the time has come for some sort of compensation scheme to be introduced for their home clubs on this side of the world.
However, the other side of it is that Murphy and the others are given an opportunity in professional sport that they would never get in this country. In the rush to judgement over what the AFL are doing, O’Riordan believes that it’s important that people don’t lose sight of that one fact.
‘Every single day, I think about how privileged I am,’ O’Riordan says. ‘I am still pinching myself about this, that I am a professional sportsman and that I am getting paid to kick a football around a field. It is the stuff of dreams, and that is the dream for every Irish player that comes to Australia.’
It’s not an easy life. Even allowing for the inevitable injuries that come with learning a new, and attritional, sport in your late teens or early twenties, Aussie Rules is also a ruthless industry.
‘It is cut-throat,’ O’Riordan observes. ‘I have only been there three years and 20 players have already turned over on the list from when I was there originally. That’s 20 out of a squad of 47.
‘It was a shock to me at the start, because you become close to these boys and suddenly they are gone. At the start, it was hard to get my head around. You make friends with boys and then they are cut and you don’t see them. So, yeah, it can be pretty cut-throat.’
And that’s why O’Riordan wouldn’t risk his current status with the Swans by playing Gaelic Games while at home. There was consternation in Dingle as Geelong’s Mark O’Connor was forbade from participating in the latter stages of the Kerry Championship having reprimanded him for playing in the quarter-final.
‘I know one of the lads got into a bit of trouble for playing a club game. But you have to understand it from the club’s perspective, they have invested a lot into making us become footballers over there and it is a risk that they don’t want you to take, playing when you are in Ireland. It is your livelihood at the end of the day. It’s not something I would risk.’ And there are perks. Having roomed with other rookies in his first season (Swans house players together as opposed to other clubs where Irish players are placed with a host family), O’Riordan is now one of the senior lads in a house in the Eastern Sydney suburb of Coogee. The Tasman sea is on his doorstep if he fancies a dip or there’s the Coogee-Bondi coastal walk. It’s an idyllic place to live. Having struggled with homesickness in his first season, he even has his own gang of Irish mates that meet up occasionally in PJ O’Brien’s on Oxford Street. There is also a Whatsapp group for the group of Irish hopefuls, such as O’Riordan, Darragh Joyce and Conor McKenna. ‘Obviously, it is a different lifestyle to what is at home. The biggest thing is the heat, even in winter, it can be 22 or 23 degrees. But it is pretty easy to stay in touch with everyone at home these days, through Facebook, Snapchat and Whatsapp. It is not like you are chatting to them once a month, you can be in contact with them every day.’ He once aspired to captaining Tipperary at Croke Park but, while that dream remains, his more immediate ambition is to emulate the man he now considers his mentor. He was only nine when Kennelly danced an impromptu jig after receiving his winner’s medal following the 2005 AFL Grand final but if he continues to follow the path plotted out by the Kerryman, then O’Riordan will want to practise those Irish dancing moves.