A SNAPSHOT IN time; 11 September, 2021. A stocking-footed Conor McKenna is bounding around outside the Tyrone dressing room in the height of his exuberance.
Along with Michael McKernan, they are gently teasing the eternal-serving Tyrone kitman Mickey Moynagh for his lack of foresight in packing beer to celebrate Tyrone’s fourth All-Ireland success achieved half an hour previously.
The biggest play in that final showcased all there is to know about McKenna. Tyrone were two points clear after 58 minutes. Conn Kilpatrick pulled down a Niall Morgan kickout. He had Darragh Canavan in front of him peeling off but to his right was McKenna tearing through, unmarked.
He took the pass and then a hop. Then a solo. 99% of players then would have popped it over the bar; to keep the scoreboard ticking over. Instead, McKenna produced a sleight of hand, a no-look pass that floats up for Darren McCurry to alley-oop into the net.
Tyrone have a second goal, with a lightning attack from one end to the other finished off by Darren McCurry in another body blow for Mayo #RTEGAA #MAYOvTYRONE
— The Sunday Game (@TheSundayGame) September 11, 2021
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In that moment, Mayo are broken. They run out of time.
Less than eleven months previously, McKenna’s intercounty senior championship career began. In a pandemic deserted Ballybofey, he was silenced by Neil McGee after coming into the game in incredible form.
The only sign of resistance came when he and Michael Murphy collided in the middle of the field. The main stand might have been empty, but the noise of the impact filled it. One Donegal journalist in the spaced-out press area suggested that some car alarms in the distance were set off with the impact.
Tyrone were shoved out of a straight knockout championship. Mickey Harte’s last game in charge. Was it for this, that McKenna abandoned a lucrative and successful career in Australian Rules with Essendon Bombers?
No. It was for 9/11/21 and Sam Maguire.
On Civvy Street, McKenna appeared to have it all going on. Partners with his brother Ryan in a coffee shop in The Moy. A few horses on the go, following the interest of his father and grandfather. He played on for another year and was the catalyst for Tyrone blowing a previously resilient Fermanagh away in the second half of their first championship defence.
But in his mind, he was already back in Australia.
*****
A few weeks back, the former Tyrone footballer and present Eglish manager, Mattie McGleenan, gathered his senior footballers around him in the dressing rooms.
Their clubmate McKenna was preparing to make his 100th appearance in Aussie Rules football and thriving once again. Released from the Melbourne footie goldfish bowl at Brisbane Lions as they geared up for Adelaide.
They recorded a small video wishing him well. Nothing too technical, McGleenan insists. Certainly not Tik-Tok worthy. Just enough to show what they think of him.
This Saturday night (Saturday morning Irish time, 10.25am (live on TNT Sports 4), at the Brisbane Cricket Ground, better known as ‘The Gabba’, McKenna will be an integral part of the Lions team taking on Port Adelaide in an AFL Qualifying game for the Finals.
By any estimation, it is some turnaround in his sporting life. During his six seasons previously with Essendon, he never hid his desperate homesickness, seemingly keeping his passport in his tail pocket permanently.
Occasionally, he would return home in the close season and line out for Eglish, a surreptitious feel to these random appearances.
Negative, and perhaps panicked coverage over a false positive Covid test made him feel alone and a long way from home in the summer of 2020. He left soon after.
What changed this time? Well, when he signalled his intentions to come back, suitors lined up. Port Adelaide, Geelong, St Kilda all had a sniff. Former club Bombers, too.
But he decided upon Brisbane. There, he could slip into the city virtually undetected and there was the obvious potential in the Lions’ roster.
The pursuit from Lions was relentless. In mid-summer 2022, their list manager Dom Ambrogio was in London with his wife and three children and sweltering in 40 degrees heat when he boarded a flight.
When he landed 90 minutes later, it was raining in Belfast. McKenna had come to meet him and was wearing riding boots.
They drove home to Eglish and Ambrogio picked McKenna’s brain, looking for clues of his levels of motivation. They sat down with his parents, Sheila and Pat at the kitchen table.
Their radar had been on him. Pro scout Shane Rogers had been watching him on the GAA Go App. Queensland wasn’t Melbourne. And his girlfriend Amy had some friends in Brisbane.
Brisbane made it happen financially by placing him on a one-year rookie deal.
And then, they played the trump card to beat all.
Every second Wednesday, his alarm sounds at 3.30am. He springs out of bed and the rough clothes go on in one movement before he makes his way to the stables of champion horse trainer, Rob Heathcote at Eagle Farm.
“Just learning off him – which I love – is something I want to build on in three or four years, whenever I go home and start training horses,” he told the club’s website earlier this season.
“My grandad trained horses, my dad trained horses and I rode horses my whole life. I got back into riding horses when I was home. I put it on the backburner when I was at Essendon, but it is something I love and something that keeps me happy away from the club.”
McGleenan coached him all the way through underage football with Eglish, and at school in St Patrick’s, Armagh.
“You have to understand that his first love is horses,” says McGleenan.
“Gaelic football, well, he worked on the principle that all he wanted to do was play. If it was soccer, Gaelic football, whatever game was going, he was playing in it.
“He’s not your typical player. You have to treat him completely differently to nearly every other player. There’s a freedom to him, a freedom to his life.
“We don’t understand the nuances of horse racing. It’s early morning stuff, out on the gallops at 5am. He had a freedom with the horses and that’s the way he played Gaelic football.
“Now, it’s very much a structured game. You can have structure for players but Conor needs the freedom to play the way he wants. Give him license to do whatever he sees.”
When McKenna first arrived in Australia, they didn’t know what to make of him. In his very first touch for the Bombers against Richmond in 2015, he squeezed in a goal from a tight angle off his right foot.
He introduced the Frank McGuigan solo dummy to the AFL. And when he came back to play with Tyrone, he could drift out of games for long spells before producing something so unorthodox that could alter the course of any game.
“He’s a game changer,” says McGleenan.
“That kind of footballer, they have to be handled differently.
“He passed a ball once two years ago. I can’t remember who we were playing but he drop-kicked a pass from the halfway line, to Aaron Daly’s chest, running towards goals.
“And I hadn’t seen the drop-kick in nearly 30 years. It was hit with pin point accuracy and Aaron was that amazed that he caught it and he was clean through on the goalkeeper.”
In an earlier interview this season, McKenna said that he had lost around four kilos of muscle during his time back home as he dodged the weights room.
When that snippet made its’ way to the northern hemisphere, the former Tyrone athletic development coach Peter Donnelly and joint manager Feargal Logan shared a chuckle. McKenna didn’t dodge the sessions, but he might have sat out more than a few reps. When you have that much charm you can get away with plenty. Besides, he was a hardy yoke when they got him.
“His biggest attribute is likeability,” says Logan.
“His durability then follows that because he’s a supreme athlete. His speed of movement, vision and thought is right out of the top drawer.
“Endurance-wise, there are differences in the two sports as to how players can come on and come off the field. But Conor has some seriously gifted natural athletic abilities that not every Gaelic athlete will have.”
He’s some loss to Tyrone. The feeling out there is that they wouldn’t have won the All-Ireland without him. And they aren’t in the reckoning now because of it.
Logan has said he doesn’t think McKenna’s Tyrone journey is over, but for now he can only look on and will be tuning in for the game on Saturday morning.
“The fact he is wanted on two continents to play high-level football shows the ability he has.
“Generally speaking, we have to commend Conor for giving up two years of his life and coming back. It happened to fortuitously be that Tyrone won an All-Ireland in one of those years. He came out of a professional sport, came back into an amateur sport and everyone knows his contribution in 2021 along the way.
“Of course, you’d love to have him in Tyrone all the time but it is his livelihood, it is his career and he’s obviously good at it and it shows how talented he is.”
It would be foolish to think that there is a less conscripted, playbook feel to Australian Rules than there is Gaelic football. The truth is that McKenna is a risk-taker in both codes anyway.
How does he do that? By not dwelling on things.
“The brilliance of Conor McKenna is that he forgets about the game, the minute the game is over,” McGleenan adds.
“Others will go home and think about it. Maybe overthink their game. That’s not Conor. When the game is over, he is thinking about other things. Maybe go home and brush a horse down, take it out for a gallop, see a race somewhere.
“And that gives him a freedom to go and play. It’s a beautiful trait to have. To let the game go and know there is more to life than playing football.”
