It’s never an easy thing to do, to put yourself in the shoes of another person, ask yourself the decision you’d make if you were given the choice.
Current young footballer of the year Oisín Mullin was going to Australia, we were reliably informed last week.
But as the hours turned to days, and the weekend came and went with no final confirmation, no shot of him leaving the airport, no picture of him holding an AFL jersey with a smiling club chairman, it became clear that actually pulling the trigger on a decision of this magnitude is no easy thing.
Mullin may well have spent a small part of the weekend looking at scenes from the Derry senior football final. At its heart was Conor Glass, who came home from Melbourne last year, having spent five years in Australia, playing 21 games for Hawthorn in the AFL before 'retiring' at the end of the 2020 season.
He played the final with a face-mask on to protect a broken nose, kicked a couple of points and was one of the major reasons why his club Glen won their first ever Derry senior football title.
When we talk about young male players heading off to Australia, there is an implied safety-net at all times. ‘You can go over, you can try it out, and if it doesn’t work out, what harm, you can come back as a young man and pick up where you left off.’
As it stands right now, the calculation is even easier for female players, who can play championship Gaelic football and AFLW in the same year, although the window for that option may close in the coming years.
Glass has only just turned 24 years old, and has, after a slow start, re-established himself as a Derry senior footballer this year, and helped his club to a county title. It seems as if the transition back has been seamless, but there are no guarantees.
Tommy Walsh’s return and subsequent struggles early on, in his second stint as a Kerry footballer (before the third and more successful stint he drew the curtain on just a couple of weeks ago), were a warning shot. Maybe there is something you lose and can’t get back by heading over there, after all?
The hardest thing for many young players heading to the other end of the world must surely be the realisation that they have volunteered to start at the lowest rung of one ladder, having hopped off a different ladder they were serenely moving to the top of.
Being very, very, very good at something – anything – is an extremely enjoyable experience (I am reliably informed). Deciding to reward yourself for that excellence by taking up a different sport, where you will be surrounded by people much better than you at this new sport, might make sense financially, but it’s a pretty odd thing to do psychologically.
New sport
Learning and competing in a new sport might be an enriching, character-building experience for some, but the reality for many players is that they won’t quite be good enough, and they will return having seen a new country, but also having to deal with what some people would term as failure.
‘Failure’ is relative, of course. If Oisín Mullin went out to Australia for two years, and didn’t play a game in the AFL, does that qualify as failure? I certainly wouldn’t think so, but what I think doesn’t matter.
If a player came back feeling beaten down by sport in that situation, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. If instead of throwing himself into club and county football, he felt absolutely worn out by the whole idea of team sport, well . . . that wouldn’t surprise me either.
Compare Tommy Walsh’s injury-hampered initial return in 2015 to Conor McKenna’s comeback in 2020, when McKenna returned to the Tyrone jersey within weeks of leaving Australia and immediately made a massive impact. Maybe what his success taught us more than anything was that the circumstances of one’s leaving the professional game Down Under are an important factor too.
McKenna had been hounded by sections of the Australian press for how he had returned a positive Covid diagnosis in the early days of the pandemic – instead of returning to Ireland having to process feelings of failure, or dealing with the outcome of an experiment that hadn't taken off, he had played 79 times in the AFL, had nothing left to prove out there, and was in fact more than happy to see Australia in his rear-view mirror.
That makes it a lot easier to throw yourself back into Gaelic football. Looking back now, it’s hard to see him having regrets about how any part of his career has panned out.
Conor Glass played in the AFL over 20 times, which is an extraordinary achievement in and of itself. For Glen, for Derry, and for himself, the benefits of his time spent in Australia might well come to outweigh the consequences of his absence from the game for five years.
Cathal McShane turned down the chance to join the Adelaide Crows in January 2020, broke his ankle in February 2020, and ended the 2021 GAA season an All-Ireland champion.
Over to you, Oisín.
