Tadhg Kennelly performs his now customary jig after lifting the Sam Maguire in September. Now he’s back to do it all again with the Sydney Swans.

Tadhg Kennelly is back in Sydney after a fairytale year with Kerry.  He sat down with AARON DUNNE to discuss the year gone by, the controversy that engulfed him in mid-October, and to explain just why he decided to return to Australia.

The summer sun is beating down on Darling Harbour as a flurry of afternoon activity moseys its way past Dock’s waterside café.

It’s 30-odd degress, and certainly an idyllic scene. To those of us that live here, though, it’s become somewhat the norm at this time of year. Or so it sometimes feels. Nothing like a year in Kerry to give yourself some perspective though.

The only thing brighter than the unforgiving ball of fire in the sky is the smile on Tadhg Kennelly’s face. Not even the mention of a certain Hand of Gaul a few hours previously can make the slightest dent in his demeanor. He’s back in Sydney. And he couldn’t be happier.

“Not bad this, eh?” he says with a smile the width of the Gap of Dunloe in a pair of board shorts, thongs and a T-shirt. A far cry from the murky depths of a dirty Irish winter, and a country floundering in recession.

He’s a new man now. One no longer burdened with the nagging thoughts of ‘might have beens’. A man ready to take on his next challenge.

In the previous ten short months he’d lived a boyhood dream. Since his departure from the Swans in January he’d won a National League title, beaten Dublin by a cricket score and defeated Meath on the way to crushing arch rivals Cork in an All-Ireland final. He’d even won an All-Star award.
Mate, you just couldn’t make it up.

Now he’d returned an all-conquering hero to the life of a full-time sportsman in a city that adores him. Why wouldn’t he be smiling?

“The year was a fairytale for me,” he explains. “To do what I did in eight or nine months, it was unbelievable. But to be honest, if I hadn’t done it [won an All-Ireland] I wouldn’t be here now. I’d still be over there trying to win an All-Ireland, and that’s the honest truth.

“Winning the All-Ireland made the decision to come back an awful lot easier. If we hadn’t done I wouldn’t have contemplated coming back here at all.”

But he did. And he has. There’s a lot to catch up on. Firstly, that third Sunday in September. The culmination of it all. The endgame that justified the risk of leaving the Swans, the heartache of leaving his girlfriend behind. An unmatchable legacy dangling 70 minutes from his grasp.

“I was more nervous than when I played in the two Grand Finals here. I think it was because of the emotional attachment I have to Kerry with my father and brother. It’s something I’ve always wanted, and something I’d felt I’d waited my whole life to get to. So I wasn’t going to let the occasion pass me by too quickly. I wanted to soak it up.

“I remember one thing my dad always said about big games, and he said it to me before the 2005 Grand Final, ‘Don’t let the occasion pass you by, soak it up’.

“We were out on the field for about 20 minutes before the game started, and we were doing warm-ups and the parade, shaking hands with the President and all that. It felt like we were warming up for ages so I just called over the masseuse and I just lay down in the middle of the field and just chilled out and relaxed.

“I was looking up at the crowd and Hill 16 and I spotted my mother and the guys and I was so relaxed. I wanted to enjoy the moment.”

Another highlight had come with his side’s demolition job on Dublin in August. A moment he feels turned everything around.

“Yeah it was brilliant,” he laughs, seemingly none too displeased that a long-suffering Dub has chosen to mention the war.

“We were wrote off so much going into that game, I’ve never seen a Kerry team being wrote off quite like that. We were beaten before we’d even togged off.

“A lot of it is national media, Dublin media, which doesn’t help, and it certainly hasn’t helped the Dublin cause for the last few years.

“The same thing happened to Tyrone last year playing Dublin. It was the exact same situation, Tyrone knocked down and Dublin built up again. You could see it in training though, the lads just lifted knowing they were going into Croke Park.

“It was an ideal fixture for us as a team that had been splitting and splurting along all summer. To get Dublin in Croke Park, that really got us across the line towards an All-Ireland medal.”

It hadn’t all been sunshine and lollipops though. An ill-advised challenge on Cork midfielder Nicholas Murphy just 30 seconds into the final could have seen it all unravel.

The incident had caused uproar when recounted by Tadhg in his new book Unfinished Business. The backlash from the media and the public verging on unprecedented.

He had said in the week that followed that it had been the worst time he’d experienced since the passing of his father, Tim. Looking back on it now, Kennelly is more philosophical.

“I think it was a storm in a tea-cup to tell you the God’s honest truth. It was blown completely out of proportion. I was probably too honest in a way. I wanted to explain how it felt to be playing in an All-Ireland final for the first time.

“I said I wanted to lay down a marker, but for people to then say to me that I premeditatedly went out to deliberately injure another player is absolutely ridiculous.

“I was disappointed with the reaction I got. I didn’t come out and say anything about it for about three or four days. I did that deliberately because I wanted to see what people would say about me.

“A lot of people really hung themselves, people I thought were friends, and that’s good to know. I’ll remember the people that supported me, but I’ll remember more the people that put me down when it happened.”

Surely there are some regrets about how it was all handled?

“Not one bit. I thought I handled it spot on. I was probably too honest in the book. It’s not in the book that I intentionally went out to hurt Nicholas Murphy. I’ve never gone out to injure another player in my life.

“Yes I spoke to Paul Galvin about it before the game and about wanting to be physical, but I never said I was going out to knock Nicholas Murphy out.”

More than just controversy followed, however. Tadhg revealed how he had received threats to the family home in the aftermath. A sorry turn in an otherwise storybook tale of triumph.

“I’m still getting hate mail and some phone calls, but it’s mainly from Kerry people. There have been phone calls to my mother’s house phone, and that was hard to swallow.

“As I said at the time, those were probably the toughest few days I’ve had since my father died. I went into a hole for two or three days.

“It was disappointing to see it happen, but it’s water off a duck’s back to me. It still hurts my mum though, and that was probably the hardest pill to swallow. I’ve had comments thrown at me my whole life so it doesn’t bother me.”

He says his decision to come back to Sydney hadn’t been an easy one. Just looking at the facts it’s hard to see why that might be. He’d won his All-Ireland, and the choice was merely one of lifestyle.

Stay in Kerry through the winter working for thirty five grand a year, drowning in the bleakness of a country struggling to keep its head above water. Or come back to Sydney, and the sunshine, to the life of a full-time sportsman on somewhere around $500,000 a year. Seemed like a no-brainer.

“I was living in Ireland, and I wanted to be in Ireland to win an All Ireland medal. My whole year was driven towards that, and that was it.

“I didn’t think about it [coming back] until probably about two weeks afterwards. I was sitting around thinking maybe I should go back.

“There were murmurs around the place and I was talking to my brother, my sister and my uncle about it a fair bit.

“The country is on its knees at the moment over there. We’re in such a deep hole recession wise. It’s unbelievable. We need something drastic to get us out of it. The year I spent there watching people losing their houses and losing their jobs.

“I’ve had so many mates that are fully qualified and they’re all losing their jobs. They’re sitting around in Listowel doing absolutely nothing.
“When I saw that happening to people, it seemed crazy not to come back when I had such a great opportunity to do that. Why would I hang around?

“This decision in a way was a big one though. It was like, ‘will I ever go back and play for Kerry again?’. The answer is I probably won’t. That’s probably the hardest part.”

He’s back in Australia for the foreseeable future now, and he promises the Swans will see a new player when the 2010 season kicks off. A man happy with his lot, and ready to once again leave it all out there for the Bloods. Even if the club he has returned to bears little resemblence to the one that he left in January.

“The club has changed a lot, even just in the year I was gone. We’ve lost Barry Hall, Leo Barry, Mickey O’Loughlin, Jared Crouch, Darren Jolly, a lot of big name players.

“A lot of good, good mates of mine are gone now. The first day I walked in I was like, ‘this is different’. Especially when you lose characters.

“These are people you’d see all day every day, and it’s the craic around the club and in the dressing room that you’d have with them, it’s gone now.

“But at the same time it’s given big opportunities to young players. So it’s going to be about getting to know those guys now.

“It’s making me feel old!” he laughs. “I’m still only 28, so I’m not that old yet. There’s a lot of young kids there, but I’m excited by that.

“I’ve got to get my body up to scratch fitness wise, but physically my body is feeling unbelievable. I’m feeling great. In fact I’m probably feeling as good in the month of November as I have in a long, long time.

“I want to get my own house in order and go from there. I can’t be looking too far ahead. I’ve got a load of time up my sleeve.

“There’s plenty left for me to achieve – another Premiership for the Swans for starters. I felt while I was playing here [pre-2009] that I had a big monkey on my back and a big weight on my shoulders about going back and winning an All-Ireland.

“But I feel that’s off me now and that I can be a better footballer and express myself a lot better here now. I remember vividly going to games for the Swans at the MCG and thinking, ‘I wish on the bus on the way to Croke Park playing for Kerry’.

“That’s a big hang up for a player going to play a professional game. It’s not the right head space. But I can guarantee I won’t have that this year. I’ve done what I wanted to do.”

What waits around the corner for Tadhg is anybody’s guess. But at least this time we’ll all have ringside seats.