FOR THE SECOND YEAR in a row, Conor McKenna will be paraded through the streets of a city he knows well in Melbourne, feted as one of the Brisbane Lions ready to do battle in the Australian Rules Grand Final this Saturday (starting 5.30am Irish time).
It’s his second year in a row in the Big Dance. Last year they lost to Collingwood. This year, they face Sydney Swans.
Should McKenna win, he would join an exclusive band of Irish Aussie Rules players to have won a Grand Final, the others being Zach Tuohy, Tadhg Kennelly and Mark O’Connor.
Alongside him in the Lions playing panel are Darragh Joyce of Kilkenny and James Madden of Dublin.
That Brisbane have three Irish players on the roster is remarkable. Joyce’s story alone is amazing: a Kilkenny man who played next to no football but was spotted for his school, Good Counsel in Wexford, and flagged as a man of potential.
Consider this though. Around half of the Irish players that go over to Australia do not actually get to play a single game in the AFL. This season, McKenna has played 17 games; overall, it stands at 122 games.
Consider also the story of the last few years of his life. In 2021, he played in and performed outrageously well in winning Tyrone’s fourth All-Ireland title. Two years later and he’s in a Grand Final. Twelve months on, and he’s there again.
For three of the last four years, he’s been a central figure in the biggest sporting occasions in two different nations. Last year we made the point that it is one of the most impressive feats any Irish sportsperson has ever managed. This year, you’d have to say it’s a certainty.
Back home in Eglish, he reconnected with pastoral, country ways. He got involved in a coffee shop venture in the nearby town of The Moy with his brother and he was able to indulge his passion for horses.
The year after, he hung around for the All-Ireland defence. It didn’t go as planned, and he surprised many when he decided to return to Australia.
After all, he made no real secret when he was there first that he craved a return home. Throwing up a false positive test while on the books of Essendon Bombers, and the media coverage and negative attention thereafter, accelerated his exit.
While he had a choice of suitors for his return, he opted for Brisbane.
It had a lot going for it. For starters, it was out of the Victoria goldfish bowl where Aussie Rules is way out on its own as the primary sporting focus.
On his days off, he could amble up to Eagle Farm or Doombeg Racecourse to do some trackwork at trainer Rob Heathcote’s stables.
The Lions though hadn’t been prominent in the AFL since the spell at the turn of the century when they made four consecutive finals from 2001, winning the first three.
When McKenna came back, they weren’t expecting much from him. They treated him like a first-year player and took things handy throughout December and January so that he wasn’t overloaded and at a risk of injury.
Instead, McKenna put the head down and became impossible to ignore.
“I was pretty bullish,” McKenna said in an in-house press conference last August.
“I wanted to play as many games as possible. My first goal was to play round one, get in the team, tick that off the list and then build consistent football.
“When I first went home, I didn’t do any gym work for two years. I’m not a massive fan of the gym, so I had a break.
“I probably lost three or four kilos of muscle mass, so that was probably the main thing coming back here, getting back in the gym on a daily basis.”
If his body of work last year was off the charts, this year he has been raced a little more lightly. In the semi-final last weekend against Geelong, he only featured for six minutes, and made two kicks.
But one of those kicks showed what he was about. At one stage, the Lions trailed 55-36. They compiled a comeback that was breathtaking to watch, then almost lost all their hard work before coming roaring back to win by 10.
McKenna could have kicked a goal himself in the fourth quarter. Instead, he looked up and made a sidefoot pass to Logan Morris to make a tricky chance a virtual certainty.
Conor McKenna is back in an AFL Grand Final.
— Balls.ie (@ballsdotie) September 21, 2024
This is glorious.pic.twitter.com/epWtp2QBYk
In many ways, it bore strong resemblance to his no-look fist pass that set up Darren McCurry for a palmed goal in the 2021 All-Ireland final against Mayo: the daring to pop up and do something out of the ordinary, the unselfishness of giving the chance over, the execution of skills in a high-pressure situation.
Colm Begley, who was with Brisbane Lions for a number of seasons before later joining St Kilda and reaching a Grand Final in 2009, still keeps a tight eye on the AFL. It was a moment that stood out for him.
“He was creative when he went over there first, chipping the ball up off the ground and doing a solo dummy,” Begley says.
“Brisbane Lions this season seem to have worked on sharing the ball a bit more, not being as selfish.
“In the GAA the attitude is always to get the ball off to the person in the better position. He always does that. I think he probably would have scored that himself. But out of the side of his eye, in his peripheral vision he sees someone and kicks it with the side of his foot. There were a few people on podcasts and such that were talking about how this was such a high level of skill to do that, on the run, in such a high-pressured situation.
“I think it’s something that the Lions would have seen in McKenna, that he can handle pressure quite well and maybe those decisions, not the most obvious ones, can help them in the final.”
Much like the Melbourne Cup, Saturday is one of the few days of the year Australia stops. Backyard barbecues and reunions will be the order of the day for the nation as they settle in to watch what unfolds in the Melbourne Cricket Ground in front of a crowd that will exceed 100,000.
At half-time, Katy Perry will provide the entertainment show.
But when the game comes down the stretch, it could be the boy from south Tyrone who decides it all.
