Former Derry star Chris McKaigue chats to CATHERINE MURPHY about his first few weeks with the Sydney Swans, learning to come to terms with the physicality of the AFL, and laying claim to a senior guernsey by season’s end.

While the Sydney Swans’ experience with nurturing Irish recruits means that Derry’s Chris McKaigue has been afforded all the trappings required to adapt to his new life in the Harbour City, training has been less comfortable for the young rookie.

Despite his AFL career being in its infancy, he hasn’t been spared any of the physical exchanges which go hand in hand with his new sporting code.

“I’ve taken a few knocks at training but that’s part and parcel of it,” McKaigue said. “Here, when players get a knock, their first instinct is to try to get straight up again.

“Their mentality is to be as tough and brave as they can. That’s how you earn respect off your 
team-mates here, there’s no room for complainers.”

The Derryman is certainly feeling the contrast between his new professional sport and his native code.

Sydney Swans new recruit Chris McKaigue is loving life as a full-time athlete.

“What I’ve learned so far is there’s a lot of pushing and shoving off the ball to make yourself available, a lot of body work, whereas at home that would be a free or even a yellow card. In Gaelic football there’s none of that before the ball comes in. It’s just so physical here.

“But then you do so much gym work here to prepare your body for it.”

Such is the level of “body work” off the ball, McKaigue admits that he can understand how differences in the physical approach in both codes can lead to conflict during international rules games.

The hybrid series is due to resume in October 2010 with the Australians planning to make the trip to Ireland. The Aussies pulled out of the 2009 series due to what they cited as financial reasons.

“The first time I played in a backs and forwards drill, the boys were pushing and shoving off the ball and I was getting frustrated with it but you get used to it. There’s no malice in it… mind you when it turns into full blown fighting that’s different.”

As big as the transition to the oval ball game’s more robust style is, the challenge is perceived even more difficult by Australians.

“When you talk to (Australian) reporters or even players, they consider Gaelic football to be non-contact, which it isn’t of course, but that’s the way they see it.”

With the Swans having missed out on finals action in 2009, and with a number of the club’s 2005 Premiership side hanging up their boots, the pre-season regime has been extra tough.

“The guys were saying that this pre-season is the most intense for a while. It’s a big change from just training in the evening at home and it definitely takes the body time to adjust.

“Because there are so many young new guys at the club, who’ve only done one or two pre-seasons or none at all, they’re trying to get miles into our legs so that we can cope with the season.

“I’m only now realising how long it is. It’s 22 games minimum, not counting finals, so you need those miles to get through it. As well as being long it’s tough and physical. You have to take the bumps and recover within a week.”

McKaigue has a big act to follow at the Swans. Tadhg Kennelly became the first ever Irish player to win a Premiership in 2005 and is now back in Sydney having added an 
All-Ireland medal to his collection. The pair actually spent some quality time together before this year’s Sydney pre-season meeting.

“I started the National league final and he came on for the last 20 minutes and was my direct opponent.”

But who came out best during the meeting which saw Kerry claim their 19th National league title with a three-point win over Derry?

“It was coming to the end so neither of us got many touches… he did go down dramatically and got a free for it though. He still gives me grief about that,” McKaigue laughs.

While Kennelly’s presence back in the Harbour City is certainly a bonus for the former Gaelic footballer, he says he chose the Swans, not just because of Kennelly’s experiences with the club, but because of the way they went about recruiting him.

“They (player development manager Stuart Maxfield and recruitment consultant Rick Barham) had seen me play a game but before they rang me, they sent me a letter first asking if it was okay to make contact. They were so respectful of the GAA and what it means to people in the way they went about it.

“At the start I was interested, but you’re always hesitant at the thought of moving to the other side of the world and leaving your family… but once they offered me a contract and I made my decision, my mindset completely changed. I’ve committed to playing AFL and making it is enough of a distraction to keep my mind off homesickness.”

Despite the challenge that lies ahead proving a big enough distraction, McKaigue admits that avoiding homesickness at all is probably impossible.

“Tadhg has said that once I start going out and making new friends things get easier. I think homesickness will always be there no matter how long you’re at the club but you just have to learn to cope with it.”

As well as Kennelly offering support, the rookie says senior players at the club have also been welcoming.

“The older guys on the team have been really good to me. Jude Bolton lives close to me and he gives me a lift to and from training every day. He’s almost 30 and has played nearly 250 games so we have great conversations to and from training.”

McKaigue also has a good network outside the club. He lives with his Australian first cousin Tom Dorrans and Tom’s girlfriend Fiona.

“He’s been home a good few times so he was pretty keen for me to come out here. I’m really lucky because his girlfriend Fiona has been really good to me and does all my cooking and washing. There are not many lads who get that done for them.”

Clearly focused on the task of playing the game at the top level, a challenge which has eluded many Irish recruits in the past, including former Swans rookies Kyle Coney and Brendan Murphy, McKaigue isn’t afraid to speak of his aim to don a senior jersey in season 2010.

“I was talking to Craig Bolton (club co-captain) and he was telling me about how much the team has changed. A lot of the really experienced veterans from the ’05 Premiership and ’06 final are gone.

“He said if I work hard there’s no reason why I can’t play towards the end of the season. I just want to work hard and learn the game and play for the reserves and then if I get the opportunity that’s all I can ask for.”

McKaigue, in the meantime, has been handed the No 36 guernsey for the season ahead.

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.

Tadhg Kennelly has admitted receiving threatening phone calls.

By Aaron Dunne

Tadhg Kennelly has revealed that he received threatening letters and phone calls to his mother’s home in the wake of the controversy that engulfed him in mid-October.

A storm blew up in the Irish media over comments the Listowel man made in his new book, Unfinished Business, in which it was implied he had deliberately set out to injure Cork’s Nicholas Murphy in the opening minutes of the All-Ireland final.

“I’m still getting hate mail and some phone calls, but it’s mainly been from Kerry people I have to say,” Kennelly exclusively revealed to the Irish Echo earlier today. “I suppose it’s because I’m one of their own and they feel like they can.

“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 just 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.”

Check out our exclusive interview with the Swannies star in the next edition of the Irish Echo, out on December 2.

Tadhg Kennelly launches his autobiography at Borders bookshop in Bondi Junction on Thursday, November 19 at 6.30pm

by Irish Echo Staff

The Sydney Swans have announced that Tadhg Kennelly has accepted a new two-year contract with the club.

The news ends the speculation about the player’s future after the Irish Echo broke the story last week that the Kerryman was set to make a sensational return to the Swans, the club with which he won a Premiership medal in 2005.

After spending a considerable time making that decision, Kennelly will return to Australia next week to officially launch his autobiography Unfinished Business and at that time, commence training with the Swans.

“It is fantastic news for the Club that he has decided to resume his career with us as he has been a really important player for the Club,” CEO Andrew Ireland said.

“We obviously understand his desire to go back and win an All-Ireland final, and it was fantastic that he was able to achieve it so quickly and emulate the feats of his father.
“As always we appreciate the tough decision it is for Tadhg to come back to us, as he ultimately ends up being a long way from his family.
“We are delighted he has agreed to a two-year contract and look forward to having him join pre-season training next week.”

Sources close to the player in both Kerry and Sydney told the Irish Echo that the 28-year-old was set to announce his return to Australian Rules football before the end of November.

Since then, the chairman of the Kerry County Board Jerome Conway, confirmed the news.

“Tadhg has notified us officially that he is returning to Australia. I suppose as things were turning out over the last few weeks, it is no great surprise to us now,” he was quoted as saying.

“He did very well while he was here. He fulfilled his burning ambition to win an All-Ireland senior medal and emulate his late father. He certainly helped Kerry’s cause in a big way this year.

“His contribution as a coach out in North Kerry has been invaluable. He left a lasting impression with the youngsters he came in contact with.”

Kennelly’s decision to return to Australia will come as a major blow to Kerry with Tommy Walsh already committed to St Kilda and David Moran hoping to secure a similar deal.

The Listowel man owns property in Sydney and his long-term girlfriend Nicole Noonan still lives here.

Irish Echo efforts to contact the player failed.

Kennelly will appear in bookshops in both Sydney and Melbourne next week as he promotes his biography, Unfinished Business.