After the swan song
Munster’s new fitness coach Bryce Cavanagh had worked with Kennelly in their time together with the Sydney Swans and suspected that with an old dog like O’Gara still craving new tricks, Kennelly was just the man to impart some.
So, he did, lining them up and kicking and catching restarts, Garryowens, and O’Gara pinging crossfield kicks to the wings for them to catch and touch down, like Shane Horgan famously did in Croke Park five years ago now next month.
All through, he was looking for them to be that bit more daring. In Aussie Rules players like Kennelly would be comfortable catching the ball over the shoulder. In rugby players have traditionally been conditioned to catch the ball almost with their chest, for fear they’d drop it or knock it on.
Kennelly worked on them taking the ball a good bit higher, and how they could turn the body while simultaneously protecting the ball; that way if they dropped it, at least they’d have the fallback of not knocking it forward. If they were to follow all that, it would speed up their play and in particular give them an advantage in a 50-50 high ball contest with an opponent.
“They were right into it,” says Kennelly.
“I’d say we only spent about an hour or so on the field, it wasn’t that gruelling, it was mostly technical, but we must have talked for ages afterwards. They were constantly asking questions, wanting to know more. And as a player, I’d like to think I’d be the same.”
For Kennelly, sharing techniques from one code to another was a natural thing to do, because all through his career with the Swans in the AFL, they devoured and shared insights from and with other sports.
It was something he restrained himself from doing in his year back with Kerry in 2009, alright.
“I didn’t want to be seen to be the cocky prick, telling the amateurs what to do. If I was there another year it might have been a lot different but in the year I was there, I just shut up, not wanting to put any noses out of joint.
“I wasn’t silly or arrogant enough to going to be going around saying, ‘Gooch, you should do this’.”
That year though was exceptional, in that or any other regard. Australian sport actively encourages a cross-pollination of ideas. In the off-season, the Swans’ backroom staff would regularly go abroad for up to three weeks and visit elite sports organisations throughout the world.
Basketball was a major source of ideas, especially in devising game plans and working out set plays. American football was another. And naturally, so was rugby.
Kennelly was very familiar with Les Kiss’s defensive expertise long before the South African mentored Ireland to the 2009 Grand Slam success. Kiss himself originally came from another sport — rugby league — and for four years he was a consultant tackling coach to the Swans.
The big thing he learned from Kiss was you don’t so much tackle with your hands as your feet and as your shoulders. Often he’d have them hold a tennis ball in either hand to emphasise the point, ensuring they’d steer their opponent into a “little metre box” and then use their shoulders rather than their grasping hands to pin that opponent back.
Another thing Kiss emphasised, like Kennelly emphasised to the Munster lads, was repetition. Repetition, repetition, repetition; it’s what makes the unnatural become natural. 13 years ago Kennelly couldn’t catch an oval ball over his shoulder either. He couldn’t even kick one. As he described it recently, it was like a bloody rabbit.
“I’d go for it over here and it would shoot over there. It was a massive pain in the arse for someone who grew up with a round ball.”
So he got himself a kids’ oval football and would go walking round the apartment kicking it, “almost like a [Gaelic] solo”, for hours on end, to the point he’d learn to master that rabbit.
How well he mastered it we in Ireland probably still don’t appreciate. We know he played there for over a decade, and thanks to that never-to-be-forgotten jig, that he won a Grand Final in 2005, but there’s a danger we could reduce his career to that jig and that hit on Nicholas Murphy in the grand final we have over here.
That would be totally unfair. His hit on Murphy might have been over the top but so was the reaction to it; Murphy got up and dusted himself off to set up a goal that put Cork into an early five-point lead. Kerry won more because of what Kennelly did to Graham Canty — running Cork’s talisman ragged — than what he did to Murphy. To reduce his magical year and his magical career Down Under to a hit and a jig would be to misrepresent an exceptional sporting career.
How big was he in Australia? On Grand Final weekend, the AFL host a big-wig dinner with a plethora of dignitaries, including the country’s prime minster, Julia Gillard. Every year, a retiring player is gives the keynote speech at the dinner. This year the 30-year-old Kennelly was given that honour. It is widely considered the finest speech the bash has known in at least a decade.
It contained everything — humour — much of it self-depreciating — humility, emotion, insight, gratitude. He spoke about his background and his father Tim and spending countless hours kicking a “footy” off the wall with his brother Noel, to the point he was good enough for the family bar to be taking phone calls from Down Under, and a member of staff would shout out to his mother upstairs that it was once “the man from Australia who wants to take your kid away!” again.
Kennelly had never been on a plane before he was taken away at 17 and after it landed “there were a lot of sleepless nights, crying myself to sleep”. From such anguish came resolve.
“I would often go back to it,” he’d say in his speech, “and say to myself ‘I have sacrificed more than anyone to make a career in the AFL and nobody is going to take it away from me’.
“I would use it in games against opponents thinking to myself, ‘I have given up a hell of a lot more than other footballers — I’m all over you today; what have you sacrificed?’ It was the sacrifice of being so far away from my family that motivated me and drove me through the hard times and onto success.”
There was something Kipling-esque about other passages of that speech. In explaining the key to Sydney’s Grand Final success was their unity, he referred to their “no dickheads allowed” policy. A less assured person would have refrained from using such a term in the presence of a prime minister, but Kennelly was so at ease with himself and in such company that he immediately suggested such a policy was “something I’m sure we could use in parliament — what do you think, Julia?”
When you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue and walk with kings and not lose the common touch, especially when you call a prime minister by her first name and mention ‘dickheads’ in the same sentence, and what’s more, she laughs, well, you’re a man, Tim’s son.
That he was making the speech stemmed from a decision he’d made a month earlier. He wishes he made the decision a month earlier than that again. The physical pain he’d been suffering had been bad enough but deliberating should he stay or should he go was even worse. Once he made the decision he should go, it felt like a boulder was lifted off his shoulders.
“That last month [before the decision] I’d been under a lot of stress trying to get myself up, energy-wise. And that was very strange because that’s not me, I’m usually a very positive person. I found myself asking ‘Am I depressed here or what? What’s going on with me?’”
It was only natural that he was going to experience some internal conflict. His first year back from the sabbatical in Ireland had been hugely enjoyable, a bit like starting all over again. The 2011 season though was a grind. He picked up a knee injury that meant he missed pre-season and the first four games of the league and after that the whole season felt like one big game of catch up.
For the first 10 years of his career, he had been blessed to be relatively injury-free. Now the body was telling him something. It took a while for the mind to want to take the hint.
“It was a scary thought, no doubt about it, the prospect of retiring. I mean, all I’ve done for a living is sport and then at 30 you find yourself going, ‘Shit, I’ve got to get a job’.
“You can see why past players suffer from depression, struggling to know what to do next.
“No word of a lie, giving up playing is an ego hit. You’re used to playing in front of massive crowds and now that’s gone. The rush of adrenaline you’d feel before a big game, where you’d nearly have the runs and feel like vomiting; that nervous tension showed just how the important the game was to you and how excited you were about it and now that excitement is gone. It’s hard for any sportsman to give that away, it’s hard to fill that gap.
“People say I no longer wanted to play the sport but that’s a crock of shit. That’s why that month weighing up what to do was so stressful. But then I sat down with a close friend [his former Swans development coach, George Stone] and started quizzing him as to what he thought about it and midway through our chat I said to myself, ‘Wait a second, when have I ever doubted myself or asked for someone’s advice on something as basic as this? I’m done’.
“And that was it. I immediately felt better. I just felt I couldn’t do myself or the Swans justice out there anymore. They offered me another year contract but I was only operating at 80% and couldn’t fully express myself.”
So the rest of his life has started. It’s been fine so far because he’s been keeping himself really busy to the point his fiancée Nicole says she saw more of him when he was playing. He’s already lined up some media work and some specialist coaching like he did with the Munster boys earlier this month but probably the most exciting challenge will be recruiting and developing talent from all around Europe for the AFL.
The continent will essentially be his oyster. He won’t be just flying to and from Australia and Ireland but all around Europe, holding trials and tests and camps all around the continent.
So, he promises, the GAA diehards can relax. He’s not some big bad bogeyman here to raid Ireland of all its star young Gaelic footballers. To be honest, he’s just as interested in some young rugby player from Romania or a tall mobile basketballer in Croatia. With the AFL now eyeing the whole of Europe, the whole of the world, there’ll be even fewer GAA players going over to Australia.
And at some stage those few will probably come back and be the better footballers, as will their teams at home for the experience and expertise they’d have picked up Down Under.
The GAA’s head of games, Pat Daly, certainly doesn’t fear Kennelly’s new project and role. Daly and Paraic Duffy have spoken to Kennelly about it and the way Daly sees it, this new arrangement is a much more up front and coordinated and less exploitative an arrangement than having “agents and middlemen like Ricky Nixon coming in here”.
“Tadhg Kennelly,” Daly has said, “has a far better understanding of this country and a far better understanding of the AFL and the GAA and their relationship than the likes of Ricky Nixon would’ve had.”
Next month he’ll hold a trial in Ireland. There won’t just be footballers at it. There’ll be a couple of rugby players and basketballers too, just as there will be wherever he’ll hold camps and testing throughout Europe.
Some of these European players will then be mentored by the likes of Kennelly to compete against an International Combined team made up of players from places like Fiji, New Zealand, the States and China. In a few years’ time there might even be an academy team solely from China. The AFL have looked at what Yao Ming did for the NBA; when the 7’6” freak of talent and height was drafted by the Houston Rockets, basketball almost overnight became the biggest participation sport in China and therefore the world.
The AFL are thinking that global, that big, and in Kennelly they have a man on board thinking on that scale.
“It’s enormously exciting what’s ahead for the AFL. They and the AIS [Australian Institute of Sport] recognise that while they have talent identification nailed in Australia, there’s a whole other world out there to look at.
“At the moment there are about 150,000 people playing [Aussie Rules] outside of Australia. Two percent of the players in the AFL right now are from abroad. In five years’ time, that could be 4%.
“Mike Pyke from Canada played rugby professionally; he’d never kicked a [Aussie Rules] ball before he was recruited. Kicking is something you can coach anyone.”
The kid who mastered the rabbit can vouch for that.
In their quest for another Yao Ming, the AFL, like Listowel, can take pride in already finding their own Tadhg Kennelly.
