COLUMN: Unknown forces steering Mayo's brightest talents towards Australia

Sat the Leaving Cert and got his results a couple of weeks back (as if it mattered), played his first season of senior inter-county football for Mayo and helped end a 75-year wait for Sam Maguire in front of over 82,000 people in Croke Park.

After a week of absolutely unimaginable celebrations, he got on a plane to Melbourne to begin his new life as a professional athlete.

Oh, and throw in the fact he's a mature, level-headed and nice young lad, he'd actually begin to sicken ya' with the cards he has been dealt!

But you would want a heart of stone to begrudge him a second of it. He's now living the dream of every young sportsperson in the world and told St Kilda's own channel of his dreams of being a professional athlete. It's an offer few would turn down.

I wrote similar in these pages when Oisín Mullin went to Geelong. Delighted for him, and honest enough to say I would have jumped at it myself at that age.

With all that being said, and as personally delighted as you can be for two young Mayo lads, viewing it through the other lens is one that irks a serious frustration and issue with the AFL and how this continues to be a problem for the GAA.

And for the record, the two feelings can sit together fine.

DAVID AND GOLIATH

The growing frustration with the AFL's scouting strategy in Ireland has been very evident the past week.

More and more pundits and former players are venting their frustrations at the potential of losing players, in particular those down south in Kerry.

I had a back and forth online during the week with a man who reckons the flak the AFL is getting is unfair. His argument was that rugby and soccer chase our players a thousand times harder, and that hurling people inside your own club are worse again for telling young lads to drop football.

He has a point on the sniping between codes at home, but that comes with the territory.

This columnist feels the comparison falls down on geography, and that is the bit people are struggling with. Lose a lad to hurling or rugby or soccer and he is still in the country, but lose him to Australia at 18 and it's a whole other ball game. There is a chance of course he comes back, but Mullin and Pearce Hanley have gone before him and done exceptionally well.

It's hard to escape the feeling that it could be a one-way ticket for Kobe.

There are a lot of people who suggest clubs should be getting some sort of compensation package from the professional teams but that has never sat right with me. It's all too transactional and these are young lads, barely out of their teens.

So we end up frustrated with no solution to offer. It is David and Goliath for most players when you weigh it up. What could we honestly put on the table against a full-time contract and a life in Australia? Even if the sport itself is terrible, you are fighting an uphill battle.

A lot of the distaste around the whole situation is the secrecy. There are people on the ground here, locally, steering our players towards Australia, and nobody knows who they are. Call it petty if you like, but it bothers me. At least put your name to the work and there might be far more understanding for it.

Beyond that, education is the only lever we have. Show them what staying looks like. Tyrone did it with Cathal McShane a few years back. He went to Australia on trial, was offered a two year rookie deal, came home and turned it down, with a job offer at home a big part of his thinking. Eighteen months later he came off the bench and goaled against us in an All-Ireland final.

That is a story worth putting in front of young lads.

PAYING PLAYERS FIXES NOTHING

The man I was arguing with landed on semi-professionalism as the answer, and he had a structure for it. Thirty two players contracted per county from the first of February. Flat money, the same in Leitrim as in Dublin and any commercial upside beyond that is your own plus tax relief for five years after retirement.

Credit where it is due, it was a good proposal.

But fundamentally I disagree with every bit of it.

Once you contract a player, once he is obliged by money, everything changes. The club game is the first thing squeezed. More money into the inter-county game means less into the clubs, and there is only one pot and when a club looks for its own player they are dealing with a contract and it can be hard enough without that.

The gap between club and county is wide enough and this widens it… and it forges a path towards full professionalism, which would be a disaster.

There is already a slightly disturbing culture forming around the paying of players with the USA. More of our better known inter-county stars are being offered serious sums to go over for the summer. Jobs, cash, accommodation, the life. Once the county season ends now, they are on a flight. Some come home and miss club championship games and others come home with their focus elsewhere.

It is their decision and they are entitled to make it. But it creates a poor culture all the same, one the GAA and GPA continually turn a blind eye to.

THE WARNING IS ALREADY THERE

We don't have to go too far to see what a devastating impact this issue can have if left untouched.

The LGFA has been absolutely gutted by the AFLW ever since Mayo's Cora Staunton made the move to Sydney in 2018. No county has suffered more than Mayo since and what that has cost this county in terms of success cannot be measured.

That success would inspire a whole new generation too… and that's the real impact.

Nationally there were 44 Irish players on AFLW lists this season, a figure that the GAA will never come close to touching it must be said. The issue is a completely different ball game with the male sport because conditions are so much more appealing to stay here and play inter-county football in the GAA than the LGFA.

The damage inflicted on the LGFA is beyond repair and will be felt for generations. The bigger worry is what it does to ambition. Young girls in Ireland are watching the best players in the county leave one by one and head off to sunny Australia.

So everyone will be using it as a springboard to an AFLW contract.

I hope Kobe McDonald has a brilliant career and I will be following every minute of it and he follows in the footsteps of Oisín Mullin and Pearce Hanley. He, like the others, owes us nothing.

But I also hope he comes home.