Homegrown a surer bet?

There has been much made of the performance of young Irishman Michael Quinn in the Bombers’ 84-point drubbing at the hands of the Crows. Quinn had eight possessions, but, with clangers and frees against, finished the night on zero Supercoach points.

 

AussieRulesBlog admires the young bloke’s gumption to up sticks and travel halfway round the world to have a crack at a foreign football code.

 

Quinn is one of the results of either:

1. a myth that the Draft is the only source of potentially capable players; or
2. a belief that the next Jim Stynes is lurking somewhere in a young Irish body.

We don’t have any stats to back it up, but our impression is that the ranks of Irish VFL/AFL stars are pretty thin. The aforementioned Stynes, Tadgh Kennelly, Marty Clarke and Sean Wight would be about it. Setanta O’hAilpin tries hard but still looks like a fish out of water. Stynes’ brother, Brian, managed a few games, but didn’t have his brother’s touch in the foreign code and another O’hAilpin had a try, without success.

 

It’s hardly a Hall of Fame roll call, yet clubs and recruiters have kept going back to kiss the Blarney Stone and light the fire of hope in young Irish hearts.

 

The lot of local kids who enter the Draft, but aren’t picked, has been pretty dim. At 17 or 18, a bunch of recruiters pass a judgement on your worth and your papers are stamped. For many, that stamp is NOT UP TO AFL STANDARD.

 

Thankfully, once almost by accident and once with a pleasing degree of persistence from the player and prescience from the recruiter, in 2010 we’ve seen an inkling that so-called mature-age recruits — Michael Barlow is an ancient 22 years! — still have something to offer.

 

The Podsiadly story is by now so well known that we need not repeat any of it. Suffice to say that Geelong’s lucky rabbit’s foot was involved in them recruiting the 28-year-old as an ancillary whilst he played for the Cats’ VFL team. The 2010 story is of an emerging key forward averaging something approaching four goals per game — admittedly with the competition’s premier midfield delivering the ball to advantage more times than not.

 

Poor ‘old’ Michael Barlow must have thought himself destined for the dimmer lights and lighter pay packets of the VFL, SANFL and WAFL, if he was lucky. Fremantle’s gamble has paid off handsomely with Barlow getting plenty of attention in Brownlow Medal betting markets. His broken leg is a setback, but we should all hope he recovers like Michael Voss rather than like Nathan Brown.

 

It’s so obvious that it hardly needs pointing out, but, unlike Quinn and O’hAilpin, Podsiadly and Barlow already knew how to play Aussie rules. How much coaching time spent on Quinn and O’hAilpin could have been better spent honing the skills of a Barlow or a Podsiadly.

 

More recently, the high-profile signings of Karmichael Hunt and Israel “The Promised Land” Folau risk the same outcomes as Quinn and O’hAilpin. Of course, in the push into hostile NRL territory, Hunt and Folau offer a publicity edge that is attractive, but their playing worth is yet to be tested. One wonders what Hunt is thinking after his first couple of outings for Gold Coast.

 

We hope that AFL clubs and recruiters learn the lesson: there are plenty of local kids who were too small, too slow or too immature. They can now make a substantial and relatively quick transition to effective players, rather than the four or six-year lead times for an international hopeful.