‘Only for the football field, most of our team would’ve emigrated’

Something in the region of 17,000km separated James McGivney from his home place of Mullinalaghta when he pitched up in Australia four years ago. Truth is, his mind never left.

A full-time beef farmer now, he spent the first three months of his stint in Oz milking on a dairy farm between the Victoria towns of Tatura and Murchison for Tony and Sharon McCarthy, who had made a permanent move from Cork in 2005.