COLIN O’RIORDAN FOUND it a strange experience once he was liberated from hotel quarantine in Sydney.
Venturing around Australia’s most populous city, it was hard to shake the old habits he picked up from living in lockdown Ireland for the previous few months.
Inside cafes he was “a bit stand-offish” which he admits drew some peculiar looks.
“Everyone was looking at me like, ‘What are you doing? Over here it’s normal, you’ve done your quarantine. You’re free of it.’
“You’re a bit on edge, you don’t really know. You’re just not used to it but it is chalk and cheese. I don’t want to jinx it now or anything but it’s as if it doesn’t exist.
“I think Victoria have had 26 Covid free days up until the other day. When there is a case, it’s only one or two and they get on top of it straight away. It doesn’t linger and the contact tracing is next level stuff. It is pretty strict but that’s what lets us live the way we are.”
After flying back from Ireland through Doha with his girlfriend Louise, the airport was practically shut down for their arrival on Australian soil. From there they collected their bags and were escorted through the airport by armed police.
“There’s no one within 100 metres of you in the airport,” he explains. “No one is allowed into the airport. You get your bags, you line up, you’re put on a bus.
“You’re literally police escorted from the airport to the hotel. You’re walked up to your room by federal police and told that this is it for 14 days.
“Your door is closed and that’s the last time you’re outside, that’s the reality of it. That’s the level of expertise and the level of discipline you probably have to have. It’s working here for us and that’s the reason we can do what we do.”
The Swans delivered a watt bike, medicine ball and other pieces of equipment to ensure the Tipperary native could train during his two weeks of isolation. He followed tailored programme designed to replicate running and maintain good mechanics.
For example, one exercise involved O’Riordan running on the spot while holding the medicine ball overhead for repetitions of 30 seconds on and 30 seconds off.
“It was good for me because it allowed my transition back onto the pitch to be a lot smoother than you would imagine,” he says. “I had that conditioning block done, simply because the running mechanics were similar to what they were giving to me.
“The hotel was unbelievable too, anything you wanted, they looked after you. To be honest too it was just training for me. It was 9-5, I had a routine, had a plan. I’d get up in the morning, know exactly what I’m doing until 12pm.
“You’d take an hour and a half break for lunch and then come back into some prehab stuff or band work. It was just filling your day with as much as you can because when you do have idle time, that’s when the hours and the minutes start to feel like days.
“That was the biggest thing just to keep busy and while it’s not the same for everybody, that was just exercise and a bit of down time, reading books and so on. It was a bit eye-opening.
“You can’t leave the room. All you want to do is go out and get some air. But you just can’t do it. But I think you realise that once you leave the room, and the 14 days are up, that’s why we can go to cafes, if you want to go to a pub, lads can go there, or whatever.
“There’s a reason it’s strict, and most people are abiding by it, and abiding by the rules, for a fairly normal life which is more than the rest of the world can probably say.”
For two weeks after quarantine, O’Riordan followed a running programme which helped with the progression into pre-season with the rest of the squad last week.
“It’s probably everything you read about, and a bit more,” he says of the notoriously taxing AFL pre-season regime.
“And that’s not me blowing my own trumpet or anything. It’s next level stuff. It’s probably not as bad though as the cold nights in Thurles. But at the same time, it’s a slog – running around a pitch. It is fairly intense.
“You’re talking about doing three sessions a week, where you’re clocking up 12km to 14km a session. That’s pretty tough on the body, once you have to back it up every second day, is the hardest thing. It’s easy to go in and do a couple of sessions, when you realise it goes on for maybe six, eight, 10 weeks, that’s probably the hardest thing of all.
“But the sun is splitting the stones here as we speak, so I can’t complain too much apart from the running.”
The night before we spoke, O’Riordan had a dream he was back playing football for Tipperary. It’s hardly a surprise, given how much the Premier’s stunning Munster triumph last November meant to him.
“It was unbelievable. If you had told me last January that I would be playing in a Munster final, and winning it and playing in an All-Ireland semi, I’d be looking at you thinking, are you for real, or what world are you living in?
“It’s just the way the year fell, the opportunity arose and it was kind of [a case of] grab it with both hands. That’s probably the biggest thing. I probably always hoped and wished I would play for Tipp again, but in saying that I wanted to ensure that I had a successful and long AFL career.
“I am not sure I would have had [the dream] if I hadn’t played. It was a special couple of months.
“And 2020 was a shocking year for a lot of people but I look back to the end of it with fond memories anyway. A fairytale ending for me, and I’ll reflect as much as I can at certain times, and you have to, I think.
“If you don’t live the good times, you will always be consumed in something else — something I have learned over the years. Live the good times because the bad times are going to chew you up anyway, so you may as well enjoy the highs while you can.”
He makes no bones about it, the heavy All-Ireland semi-final defeat to Mayo badly stung the Premier players.
“You are only as good as your last game and in our last game we felt like we embarrassed ourselves against Mayo. There is a lot of hurt coming from the group with regard to that.
“We had such a high against Cork and such a low against Mayo. We were pretty much gone out of the game by half-time and I think there is a burning desire to succeed again because of that.
“I just remember coming off the pitch and all I could think of was, ‘Jesus, we’ve let down a lot of people here.’ We were genuinely embarrassed, that’s the only way I could describe it. But again, looking back now it was either nine or 11 one-on-ones we missed, and clear-cut goal chances, wasn’t as if they were half chances that went over the bar.
“Obviously David Clarke was incredible in goals on the day, and they took their chances, we didn’t take ours. But if Conor [Sweeney] or Michael [Quinlivan] had got the goal early on, it could have been different game, who knows, we’ll never know.
“But I suppose you do look back and realise you are not as far off the boil as you think.”
O’Riordan says he was aware of some critics on social media who questioned Sydney’s decision to allow him tog out with his county during the AFL off-season.
“People are entitled to their opinion and you have to understand it as well.
“People are selfish by nature and they want the best for their club and for their own personal needs and that’s really healthy.
“People don’t want you getting injured over there because they feel it’s unfair and I’m sure there’s an element of there’s an Aussie as good that could take his job and he’s coming over here and playing our sport, and wanting to take our jobs, and that’s just the way it is.
“But at the same time, I don’t think you can let it bother you all that much. I’ve said it 100 times, but the club have been exceptional to me.
“I think they realise that there’s more to life than football, and while football consumes you, they understand the passion and desire of the Irish players, in particular, have of playing for their county, and what it means to represent their county. So I think that’s the biggest understanding and biggest learning curve for AFL clubs this year, is definitely that.”
After Cork’s Bríd Stack suffered a broken neck during the AFLW pre-season, she endured a trial by social media which she admitted recently impacted her.
O’Riordan, who along with Setanta Ó hAilpín and Nicholas Walsh reached out to Stack to offer support, says online criticism is unfortunately something high-profile athletes have to deal with.
“As bad as it sounds, it probably is. It shouldn’t be the case but that’s the way it is. As sportspeople you have to respect everyone has a voice.
“It doesn’t matter who you are or what you are doing any more, everyone has a voice. They can hide behind an egg [profile picture] on Twitter and give their opinion and suddenly it’s gospel.
“That’s hard for anyone to deal with. I think if you are not thick-skinned enough to ignore them, it can eat you up inside, and I am not saying for a second Bríd did that.
“I got in contact with Bríd and she was in good spirits straight away.
“I know she is a strong enough and an able enough lady, but like you just have to ignore these people, and it sounds easier to do than what it actually is. It sounds like a cliche, but it’s the only thing you can do, is turn a blind eye to it, because 95% of them haven’t a clue what they are saying.
“Bríd was in a vulnerable position when she was bending over to pick up the ball,” he says of the incident, which later saw Ebony Marinoff escape a three-match ban on appeal.
“That’s probably why it became such a big issue if it makes sense. It doesn’t matter how innocuous it might look, the player tackling the other player always had a duty of care to the other player they are tackling.”
In terms of O’Riordan’s future, at 25-years-old he hasn’t yet “closed the book” on a return to the Tipperary jersey at some point.
“At the same time,” he reasons, “I have an opportunity here. I have only one year left on my contract in Sydney and you have to be realistic about that as well. The chips are down for me and this year is going to be a big year and that’s the reality. There’s no point sugar-coating it and saying you’re going to be here for another ten years when you’re only contracted for one.
“So you have to be realistic, but at the same time you have to be ambitious and think you’re going to be here for five more years. In the back of my mind I’m thinking I really want to succeed at this game and prove people wrong who thought you couldn’t do it.
“You just want to have a real crack at it and I have a real desire to succeed with the club and that’s the biggest thing for me. I just want to play over here for as long as I can. It’s not a case that I’ll never put on the Tipp jersey again, but I’ll probably give this the best opportunity I can.”
He admits there is added pressure as a player entering a contract year.
“You’d be pretty naive or pretty stupid if you didn’t think that it wouldn’t bring added pressure. I’m a hard critic of myself anyway but that’s probably the biggest pressure I have, my own pressure that I set on myself and the targets I want to achieve myself.
“Whether I have one year or four or five years, my aim every week is to go out and give it as much as I can regardless of what the circumstance is. A lot of people would think because you’ve a year, things change and you have to try and invent something but to me that’s probably not the case.
“It does create a bit of uncertainty about the rest of your future off the field but on the field I can’t see it changing too much. I’ve been there long enough now that if I can bring my game to another level and slowly build again, I’ll be pretty happy within myself and I know that I can put my head on the pillow knowing I had done everything I could.”
Ultimately, it’s a decision that will be made at the end of the season.
“It’s pretty much a decision that the club make but obviously everyone has their own agents over here so your agent will have a discussion with the club and that’s just the way it works. It’ll probably be the end of the year, we’ll have a discussion about it and go from there.”
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Speaking at the launch of Sport Physio Ireland’s new Athletic Development App for GAA Club Teams, O’Riordan says “it’s a really good platform. Mobility, stretching, strength, these are all things that probably get neglected, especially prehab stuff.
“It allows young fellas to actually get this in a really high quality platform and it does enable kids, especially 15, 16, 17-year-olds and later on in terms of senior to really progress at a rate that you wouldn’t be able to if you’re not in inter-county or professional set ups so there is a lot of comparisons in the stuff.”
Click here to register for your free session on the Athletic Development App
- Originally published at 06.05
