FROWN UNDER

It seems inevitable that the GAA's established names will be given chance to bolster Irish AFL ranks

- BY GARRY DOYLE

THE sun comes up over Sydney today and somewhere between the bounce of the Sherrin and the roar of the crowd there will be a familiar Irish accent.

Fourteen of them, in fact.

Boys who once chased a size-five ball across boggy club pitches are now professional athletes in a sport they barely knew existed as teenagers. It is a remarkable export story. It is also, depending on where you sit, a quiet raid on Gaelic football's most valuable assets.

Take Mark O'Connor. If you watched him help Dingle win this year's All-Ireland club Championship, you saw exactly what Kerry have been missing: a tall, ball-playing midfielder with composure and vision. The type of footballer who glides rather than crashes through traffic.

Jack O'Connor went as far as to say that if his namesake had stayed in Ireland he might have added "one or two more All-Irelands" to Kerry's honours board - an acknowledgement of what walked out the door.

O'Connor is now part of the furniture at AFL giants Geelong where he has built a career that long ago passed the point where anyone could call it an experiment.

His teammate Oisin Mullin followed him there at the start of 2023. Mullin was twice the GAA/GPA Young Footballer of the Year and an All Star in 2020 before swapping Castlebar for Kardinia Park.

Think about where Mayo are now and where they might be if Mullin was still patrolling the halfback line.

"They're stealing our crown jewels," Pat Spillane (inset) said this week.

It sounds dramatic until you list the names. Conor McKenna is another. He returned briefly to win the 2021 All-Ireland with Tyrone, defeating Mullin's Mayo in the final, before heading back to Australia.

Tyrone could do with him now.