Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Weighting game for Down ace
DOWN star Caolan Mooney has admitted he wasn’t ready to be an inter-county footballer when he first ditched Aussie Rules.
Mooney, 24, will be Rostrevor’s main man when they take on the Sean Cavanagh led Moy in Sunday’s AIB Ulster intermediate club final.
But it wasn’t a case of jumping straight off the plane from Australia and dominating after he and fellow Down man Marty Clarke quit AFL side Collingwood in late 2014.
But he needed to lose nearly one-and-a-half stone and quit the panel for a period in 2016.
Mooney, who played six times in three seasons for Collingwood admitted: “I wasn’t ready at all. When I came back I was 93kg and I was playing this year at 84kg. It took me a couple of years to shed a bit of weight and that extra weight I was carrying didn’t help my hamstrings.
“Gaelic football is more about speed and the AFL is more about endurance.
“Last year (2016), getting away from Down really gave me that buzz to come back in so I tried hard to get into the shape of my life.
“I felt I did that but just before the Armagh game, I tore the patella and that set me back about five or six weeks and I went through the Championship trying to chase fitness.
“I was playing on a Sunday and then I couldn’t train again until maybe the Thursday because the knee wouldn’t settle down. By the end of the summer I wasn’t as fit as I’d like.”
Former Down All-star Clarke was yesterday named part of the new Cavan U20 football management team for 2018 under boss Kevin Downes.