Fogarty Forum: AFL is a banned acronym in Kerry

The morning after the awards gala, this writer contacted a fellow All-Star winning Kerry player for a response to the news Kennelly was leaving after one season in senior county colours. He texted back to say he shouldn’t have had to learn of it from a journalist.

Kennelly wasn’t going to top what he had accomplished that September. Repeating the jig he performed after winning an AFL Premiership medal in the Melbourne Cricket Grounds in 2005 on the Hogan Stand rostrum four years later, he had squared a circle.

What was left was another stab at a Premiership and a salary in Sydney, a reported €300,000 per annum. As Zach Tuohy writes in his soon-to-be-released autobiography The Irish Experiment, “You can’t lodge love of the game in your bank accounts…” In his offering, Tuohy trains his crosshairs on current Kerry U20 manager Tomás Ó Sé who has taken exception to the likes of his old team-mate Kennelly drawing from Gaelic football’s young talent pool for the benefit of AFL clubs.

Seeing as Tuohy is another case of an Irish boy who did good in the Australian game and wants to get into the recruitment business himself, that isn’t surprising but his argument against Ó Sé is premised on false equivalence.

“It’s funny how, when a players leave GAA to play rugby, there aren’t any such columns,” writes Tuohy. “None of the commentators seem to care.” He continues: “And don’t get me started on golf. Shane Lowry played Gaelic football for Clara, then left to tour the world as a professional golfer. How dare he? His dad Brendan, along with Shane’s two uncles, won an All-Ireland with Offaly in 1982. With that pedigree, how could he leave Gaelic football?” Notwithstanding Tuohy’s flippancy, the Golfing Union of Ireland, as it was known back then, would have invested plenty in Lowry as his beloved Clara. His great home golf club of Esker Hills would have done the same. There were no hard feelings when he pursued a professional sporting life.

Darren Sweetnam may feel like the one that got away from Cork hurling but Dunmanway Rugby Club and Munster put the time and effort into nurturing him obvious talent as Dohenys and the Cork County Board. Again, no hard feelings. When other sports have contributed, there can’t be.

That’s why the AFL are considered an invasive, predatory species. They didn’t volunteer to coach, they didn’t fundraise to provide. The punch-line to the old Vietnam jokes applies directly to them: “You weren’t there, man.” It was with heavy hearts that Dingle wished Mark O’Connor farewell in 2016 and his absence was again felt last weekend as another chance to bring the Bishop Moynihan Cup to Corcha Dhuibhne for the first time since 1948 was lost.

Following O’Connor to Geelong, Cillian Burke last week became the sixth Kerry footballer since Kennelly to sign an AFL contract. Not a significant figure over 25 years you might think but consider that Dublin have had two in that time and Ciarán Kilkenny was out the door of Hawthorn as quickly as he went through it (the other, James Madden, has recently returned home).

In Kennelly and O’Connor, Kerry starlets have examples of players who have made the transition from Gaelic football to AFL. The late Jim Stynes of Ballyboden St Enda’s did too but his last game was in 1998. Since 2001, a Kerryman has been playing elite Australian Rules in all but five years. Is it any surprise the AFL is a banned acronym in some parts of Kerry?

Tuohy is certainly a role model in Laois. What the man achieved in making a record 288 AFL appearances is truly one of the great, if unheralded achievements by an sportsperson hailing from this island. His affection for his Portlaoise home club is clear. The front of the book features him holding aloft the green and white flag of “The Town” after winning his 2022 Premiership with Geelong Cats.

He writes of fashioning the flag from a Nigerian one, asking an arty team-mate to paint onto it “C’mon The Town”. A blown-up photograph of him with it adorns the wall of the Portlaoise gym. His original club are rightly proud of their son.

However, he has lost some of his Irish sensibilities if he believes the AFL is doing nothing different to Irish-based sports offering a full-time alternative to GAA.

john.fogarty@examiner.ie 

Canning and Hogan show grudges work.

It feels almost appropriate that two hurlers of the year three seasons apart would bring out autobiographies within a few weeks of each other.

Not just that, Joe Canning and Richie Hogan are the archetypal “I’ll show you” hurlers. Their awesome talents weren’t enough to get them to the finishing line; they needed an angle too.

The indications that Canning gleaned plenty from being written off came in his user handle on that old social media platform Bebo: slowandonesided. In his fine offering with Vincent Hogan, he displays all that spikiness that made him what the great he was.

An interview promoting “Joe Canning – My Story”, only hardened that opinion of him when he spoke of playing Cork in an All-Ireland U16 final, words that prompted a skit by comedian Kayleigh Trappe.

“The first day was a drawn match and I wasn’t great, to be honest. I scored four or five points, I was pretty shit. The following day, it was like 10 weeks later, there was some delay or whatever, the same marker who was marking me the day before comes out and says, (imitating Cork accent) ‘I’ll had you in my pocket the last day and I’ll have you again’.

“The manager comes out and says, ‘He’s in your pocket’. There were a load of boys saying it, the goalie, the whole lot. I was pretty pissed off anyway after the first day that I’m not going to be so shit again. I went out and scored 2-8 and we won the All-Ireland. It was one of those things that you’re kinda like, ‘Fuck you. Get back in your pocket’.” 

In conversations around the release of “Whatever It Takes” with Fintan O’Toole, Hogan revisited his vicious battles with Jackie Tyrrell in training, believing the huge potential he brought into the Kilkenny set-up was being tested and he answered fire with fire.

Privately, Hogan would have felt he deserved a second hurler of the year award. Canning probably thinks that too. Anything for an edge.

Gillane didn’t do enough for All-Star

The All-Stars debate is over for another year and dare we say illustrates that memories need to be refreshed when the championship wrapped up over 100 days ago.

Aaron Gillane’s absence from the hurling selection was raised by some commentators including our own Anthony Daly but when you score just 1-2 from play in five Munster games you can’t have too many complaints about not being selected.

Undoubtedly, Gillane performed superbly in the All-Ireland semi-final against Cork and won several of the frees he converted throughout the championship but it was not an All-Star year for the Patrickswell man.

Conor Leen was the answer to what had been a tricky position for Clare to fill in recent years. However, Dan Morrissey’s standards never slipped from the first day out in Cusack Park and he merited a second successive All-Star in the full-back line.

All-Stars should be and are about the micro, not the macro. Too much store can be put into county representation at times but they do matter and six is a reasonable number for an All-Ireland winning team like Clare that lost twice even if Cork’s five may be a little high for a team that lost on one more occasion.

Of the Kilkenny players who weren’t chosen, Cian Kenny arguably had the greatest shout ahead of David Blanchfield and John Donnelly. But to find a place for him was always going to be difficult when Tony Kelly above anyone else proved there is life beyond a Munster championship.