HE JETS OFF today with dreams swimming in his head and hope in his heart.
A massive loss to the Tipperary senior footballers but potentially a huge gain to AFL giants Sydney Swans, Colin O’Riordan has been reflecting on his journey in an exclusive interview with Tipperary GAA before leaving for pastures new.
O’Riordan’s potted history is thus – dual All-Ireland minor medallist, 2015 Munster U21 football winning captain, Allstar nominee in 2014.
There’s more, much more than that to O’Riordan, as his coaches and teammates will testify.
A fiercely-driven character, the 20-year-old JK Brackens clubman was an inspirational figure in every dressing room he inhabited.
Now, he admits that he’s a “small fish in a big pond” as he looks to make his mark in the cut-throat world of professional Australian Rules Football.
He’ll start off as a rookie but aims to make his mark quickly.
“That’s the dream, isn’t it? To be up there playing in the Grand Final over there, their All-Ireland final.
“That’s the dream I have going over. I just want to be playing on the biggest stage. I know it will be hard, I’m a small fish in a big pond again. I have to establish myself but I’ll give it a go and hopefully in two years, you’d never know what might happen.”
O’Riordan made his mark at an AFL combine and Swans scouts were left suitably impressed.
Over the course of three days, O’Riordan excelled with his kicking and handpassing of the oval ball.
The contract was in the bag before it came to the endurance phase of the combine.
“I was lucky enough, I got word on the Friday night before any of the running happened,” he reveals.
“You could just run at your leisure for the next few days.
“When you’re kicking a ball, it’s very easy to get used to any shape of ball, it doesn’t take that long.
“All it takes is an awful lot of time and a bit of practice. That’s what I did for the whole month before hand. I put away the round ball and concentrated on the oval ball, and it paid off.”
And O’Riordan knows that hard work is the name of the game in Australia.
A naturally fit and lean athlete, he realises that he’ll need to spend some time lifting weights to be ready for the demands of first team fare, if that opportunity arises.
“To be honest with you, I didn’t get much into strength and conditioning at home.
“I tended not to, to be honest but when I go over there I understand that I have to bulk up a bit or they’ll walk on top of you.
“But what I saw over there is that the GAA and AFL are not dissimilar in what the strength and conditioning programmes actually are.
“The difference is that the AFL is professional and the GAA is amateur but other than the name, gyms and everything about it is much the same.”
He leaves with something of a parting shot, too, warning that the GAA may face a player “uprising” if conditions don’t improve for players.
“Before I went over I would have thought the GAA could go professional and I would have loved to see it go professional but after coming back, you just realise that the population is too small and that’s the biggest thing.
“If the population in Ireland was 20 or 30 million, there would be no issue and the GAA would be gone professional a long time ago.
“But I think a lot of the time, you’re kind of looking back and if you get a good crowd at the match, we’re not seeing any money and the effort and the time that we’re putting into it.
“You’d question at times, perhaps the GAA could facilitate the players a bit more and maybe a percentage of the gate for finals or semi-final teams but some reward has to be given to players. In the not too distant future, there could be a small uprising coming.”
