WHEN MARTY CLARKE thinks back to his career playing Aussie Rules Football, one sultry evening in the Melbourne Cricket Ground stands out as the big missed opportunity.
Given he wasn’t out in Australia for long, it came too soon to hurt much, but also to appreciate.
For all his well-signposted fame as a schoolboy footballer, taking the field for Collingwood at the Melbourne Cricket Grounds for a preliminary final (semi-final for shorthand) when facing Geelong in front of 98,002 was a fair step up from a MacRory Cup final.
That evening, they lost by five points. Just 19-years-old, Clarke made four marks, kicked ten times and handballed it eleven times. Only Dane Swan and Heath Shaw got on more ball than him, but the last word fell to Geelong’s Gary Ablett who sealed it with a goal.
In the final a couple of weeks later, Geelong met Port Adelaide. They won 163-44, the biggest winning margin by a mile in the AFL Grand Finals.
Only three Irish men have won a Grand Final; Tadhg Kennelly with the Sydney Swans in 2005, and Zach Tuohy and Mark O’Connor last year with Geelong.
When Tuohy and O’Connor were winning their title, the news hadn’t long broken that Tyrone footballer Conor McKenna was going back for another lash at the AFL. That he now gets to appear in this Saturday’s Grand Final, against Clarke’s old side Collingwood Magpies, is little short of astonishing.
Clarke is far from embarrassed to admit to a pang of jealousy at how McKenna takes centre stage in one of Australia’s most treasured sporting cultural events, along with the Melbourne Cup.
“It’s their Superbowl, for sure,” says Clarke.
“The MCG, the attendances have been crazy, games where there have been over 95,000 I think in the last three or four games there.
“But it is ‘the’ cultural event. Victoria, South Australia and West Australia is predominantly just AFL. The northern states of New South Wales and Queensland, there is more of an emphasis on Rugby League, a bit of Union, but the AFL have driven their product incredibly well.
“It is the Nation’s Game. The Grand Final is the day where people host the barbecues, everyone gets together, people will be hosting around 30 friends and family. It doesn’t matter who is in the final really, it really is that big event.
“They have the Grand Final Parade, where the two teams will be paraded through Melbourne City for whoever many fans and all those little add-ons, the open training sessions…
“I mean, can you imagine that in GAA?”
We know the answer to that.
A bit like McKenna’s journey. In many ways you’d love to see him at close quarters on a week like this. A few years ago he finally made good on his promises to return home to Ireland. While in Australia, it ragged some that he reserved a bit of nostalgia for the Old Sod and articulated his feelings of loneliness and homesickness.
Throwing up a false positive test at a time when there was a lot of fear around Covid, led to a feeding frenzy in the Australian media. McKenna’s club was Essendon. One of the blue bloods. In the Victorian footie culture, he felt like small fry in a goldfish bowl, surrounded by piranha.
So when it came to a second coming, he picked wisely. Brisbane would be a remove from Victoria, and he could indulge his passion for horses with some good connections.
Clarke remains obsessed with the AFL. While he was coaching Down this year, a great deal of what he likes to put into practise comes from the AFL culture. In time, he hopes to introduce even more and he has watched McKenna’s re-introduction with great enjoyment.
“Conor is a free-spirited guy. He has got a personality that if you watch AFL, his play matches his personality, which is a brilliant trait.
“He chose Brisbane and Queensland, as they were a great team. But he was out of that massive pressure in Essendon Collingwood, Carlton, down in Melbourne.
“He probably chose them with that in mind and would have a lot of time away from the game.
“The way he trains and plays, you can tell that he is really loving it and he is playing a role for the team. It’s amazing what he has done, stayed a few years away from the sport and came back to play it even better than before. It really is amazing.”
What strikes anyone watching McKenna, in the purple and gold Guernsey of Brisbane Lions or the white and red jersey of Tyrone, was how he seems unrestrained and uncontainable. This is not someone you imagine spends much time in self-excavating reflection. He just goes and does what he does.
Surely though, that’s a crude impression of what goes on in the mind of a professional athlete?
“That is on the coaches. That is on a coaching team to allow a player to play to their strengths,” Clarke insists.
“He can be creative, take kicks on and he has an element of freedom.
“I would imagine Chris Fagan and the coaches are telling him that when they get the ball, ‘Go and do your thing, Conor.’”
He continues, offering a hint to where his own coaching journey might be heading; “That’s a lot of what the coaching is like in Australia. You see Ange Postecoglou, he belongs to the same mindset. They want players doing what they are good at. They don’t want a player going out feeling stressed about their role.
“There are moments in the game, in any game, where you have to do all parts of the game in the AFL. But I just feel that it is a great way to be in coaching.
“That’s only really come in, in the last seven or eight years. The AFL psychology at the minute, they want their players to be happy and they want to play them in roles in which they are going to enjoy and going to contribute and that’s where Brisbane and Conor, it’s been a perfect match for them.”
In 2021, McKenna was only in his second season back with Tyrone when they won the All-Ireland title.
He didn’t claim an All-Star, but there was no doubt that they wouldn’t have been in with a chance of winning it all, without him.
That doesn’t mean he was universally appreciated. McKenna wasn’t always consistent throughout a full game. Instead, he would put huge efforts into short spells and then seemingly drift out of games.
It was perhaps a habit built from Aussie Rules, where a player empties the tank and then takes their place on the bench on the interchange. It led to him being labelled by some in the coaching world as a ‘moments player.’ You own attitude towards that sub-section of Gaelic footballer really depends on how much trust you might hold in players.
“Even in the (2021) semi-final when they beat Kerry, he scored two goals in that game,” Clarke recalls.
“I know one came to him off the upright, but the other one, most players are taking a point there, whereas McKenna has that ability to not be concerned what others might think if it doesn’t come off. He just goes and does it.
“I think that ‘moments’ thing is potentially an AFL influence, but also there is very little ‘chaos’ in Gaelic football now. The game is quite structured. Whereas once the chaos comes in the AFL, that’s when McKenna loves it. He picks it up as he goes.”
A Grand Final Parade through the streets of Melbourne coming into the early Aussie summer, a crowd of almost six figures, watching lads in sleeveless vests playing.
It’s a long way from Eglish.