AUSTRALIAN RULES Tadhg Kennelly’s success with the Sydney Swans is one of the main reasons why the sport is so popular in Ireland.
Pic: Sportsfile
Mariners set sail Ciarán Ó hEadhra is forming an Australian rules football team in Mayo Daniel Carey DAVID Beckham has tried it. James McCartan has represented Ireland in it. Pierce Hanley is playing it professionally. And now it’s coming to Mayo. What is it? Australian rules football, of course.
Ciarán Ó hEadhra, an Erris man who has played a big part in establishing the sport in Ireland, is bringing Aussie rules to his native county. The club now has a name (Mayo Mariners ARFC), a website (www.mayomariners.com) and a Bebo page (www.bebo.com/marinersmayo). A green and red kit is already on order. Now all they need are the players.
Ó hEadhra loved watching Aussie rules on ‘Sports Stadium’ as a kid. Cousins in Oz brought him a video on Jim Stynes. Later in life, he was working as a GAA journalist on the RTÉ programme ‘Breaking Ball’ and did a story on Colm Cronin from Knockmore, who was setting up an Aussie rules team in Dublin. Cronin asked him to help so he got involved with the Dublin Demons club.
Ó hEadhra later worked with Setanta Sports and has now established his own television production company, Asgard Media, with offices in Dublin and Doolagh, Geesala. He’s President of the Australian Rules Football League of Ireland, so when he was moving home a few months back, fellow Aussie rules enthusiasts urged him to get a club up and running in the west. With fixtures spread around the country, he reckons they need 20 players to compete.
“The season kicks off in the middle of March, and we have until the middle of February to declare whether we’ll be able to put a full team in,” he told The Mayo News. “If we can’t have a full team from Mayo, we’ll go in with a team from Mullingar for the first year … [but] it’d be great if we could get a team out of Mayo that could stand on their own straight away, because there are definitely a lot of good footballers in the county.”
If the Mayo Mariners get the green light, it’ll be one of two new Irish teams, as Tadhg Kennelly’s cousin has established a team in Kerry called the Kingdom Kangaroos. The sport has attracted players of many nationalities and varying sporting backgrounds. Ó hEadhra has played a lot of basketball and Gaelic football as well as a bit of rugby, and explains that Aussie rules is particularly popular among proponents of the other oval ball game.
“You get a lot of rugby players, because it doesn’t coincide with their season. It’s a good way for them to keep fit and competitive during the summer, and the physical contact aspect appeals to them. You obviously get an awful lot of Gaelic footballers because of the similarities in the game. But we’ve had Polish guys and Spanish guys; we’ve had a couple of Romanians who had never played anything other than soccer. So it’s a league of nations, and all-comers are always welcome.”
Ó hEadhra stresses that it’s not necessary to excel at the sport in order to enjoy it. “I wouldn’t be a good footballer at all myself!” he laughs. “There is room for the fella who just wants to keep fit, socialise with a group of people and enjoy what he’s at.” The social scene associated with Aussie rules in Ireland is, he says, ‘very like what rugby would have been ten years ago’. Teams travelling long distances (to Cork, for example) stay overnight, are hosted by the home team, and mix with the guys they’re playing against. The camaraderie has even spread to the Southern Hemisphere.
“I’ve done a year in Australia myself, and having played with and against Australians in the league, you find that if you arrive in a city and you get in touch with them, they’ll help you out when you’re starting out there. So there’s a real lifelong community in it,” Ó hEadhra offers.
Players of a higher standard can aspire to represent Ireland at the Australian Football International Cup, which will take place in Melbourne next August and September. Although ex-pats do feature on some of the Dublin teams, Aussies are not allowed to take part in this ‘World Cup’, which Ireland won in 2002. Papua New Guinea (where Aussie rules is ‘nearly the national sport’), New Zealand, South Africa, Britain, Demark and the USA will all be competing in the competition, which coincides with the 150th anniversary of the sport’s first game. While some other countries are ‘heavily funded’ from Australia, and South African players will probably soon be drafted into the AFL, the Irish organisation don’t tend to receive funding. “Their way of looking at it is that they can recruit Irish players from Gaelic [football] anyway,” Ó hEadhra explains.
The Mayo Mariners will wear green and red, colours shared by the Fremantle Football Club based in Western Australia, and the kit is already on order from Australia. Ó hEadhra hopes to use his contacts ‘down under’ to set up twinning arrangements with other clubs, to open up the possibility of coaching advice and, ultimately, scholarship agreements, ‘so that the best young Irish player from each club would get the opportunity to go over and play with a club in Australia’.
Maybe in a few years time, Pierce Hanley will have some company in the AFL. Watch this space.
Mayo Mariners ARFC are currently recruiting players, coaches and volunteers from all around the west. Anyone interested can e-mail recruitment@mayomariners.com or text 087 2487907.
