It is reported today that Carlton have delisted Setanta O’hAilpin. The decision was forced on the Blues by the AFL’s rules requiring all clubs to free up places on their lists each year leading up to the national draft. Carlton had apparently indicated they were happy to keep O’hAilpin on their list, and could, were O’hAilpin to nominate, draft him again.
There are two issues: Forced turnover of club lists; and the Irish experiment. We want to focus on the second in this post.
There have been a steady flow of recruits to AFL from the emerald isle. Of course, the similarities between Gaelic Football and Australian rules mean that there’s a slightly shallower learning curve than for rugby (league or union), soccer or gridiron players.
Clearly the most successful of those recruits has been the Demons President, Brownlow medallist Jim Stynes. Despite looking like a fish out of water on-field, Stynes carved out a unique career in AFL and prompted a number of lateral thinkers in the game to plunder the ranks of up and coming Gaelic footballers looking for the next Jim Stynes.
The results have been mixed. The Barcodes’ Marty Clark, set to resume his AFL career in 2012, looked the most natural of the Irish imports to make the big time in our view. AussieRulesBlog saw ex-Saint, new Swan, Tommy Walsh, during the pre-season competition and thought he looked quite at home — although he failed to win selection for the Saints during 2011. Recently retired Tadgh Kennelly, a Premiership player with the Swans, is probably the most successful after Stynes. For the rest, at least in football terms, AFL has proved to be a quite tough task. The Bombers’ Michael Quinn, with whom we’re a little more familiar due to our Bombers allegiance, played a couple of senior games in 2009 and looked, frankly, a little like a rabbit in the headlights.
Setanta O’hAilpin has played 80 games for the Blues and kicked 67 goals.
In the wake of the surprise recent emergence of James Podsiadly at Geelong, Michael Barlow at the Dockers and Stuart Crameri at the Bombers, to name just a couple of mature-age recruits, we wonder whether AFL recruiters will remain interested in immigrants without the instinctive feel for Aussie Rules that kids who’ve grown up with the game possess.
Ed (19 Oct 2011): And the answer is “Yes, they can!” (as long as it’s a special deal that doesn’t impinge on their ‘normal’ list).
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2 comments:
you never heard of zach tuohy, niall mckeever or pearce hanley mate? all future guns. especially hanley, potential to be better then all of them
G'day Anon. Thanks for stopping by.
Yes, I've certainly heard of the players you mention, and, yes, they do look to have the potential and capacity to carve out careers in AFL. But, for the moment, potential is all they have. When they've put a couple of hundred games behind them, played in a Premiership or won a Brownlow Medal we can start to compare them to the greats.
But their first goal is 80 games and not being cut from a club list, wouldn't you say?
I wish them luck, but the numbers and the effort for Irish recruits don't stack up against natural Aussie Rules footballers who've lived and breathed it since childhood.
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