KIDS from throughout the Far West and all over Australia travelled to Ireland last month to compete in Gaelic football.
Local teenager Corey Templeton was part of the cohort of about 50 students who spent two days flying across the planet to learn and play the sport.
“It’s like AFL and soccer mixed together,” Corey said.
“It’s Ireland’s national sport, and the only sport they really play over there, so it was interesting to go over and see how they play”
Invites were offered to kids that played AFL and were playing represented footy.
Corey spent many years growing up on a station near Milparinka with his dad, Michael O’Connor, commuting 285kms one-way to play footy in Broken Hill on the weekends.
“We started off driving down to town for each game,” Mr O’Connor said.
“We often didn’t make training too, but the North Footy Club were pretty accommodating, they realised it’s 285kms to home, so they’d make sure that Corey and his brother got a game.”
Corey said he’d been to Sydney before on a plane to represent Broken Hill in AFL, but had never travelled overseas.
“I really enjoyed it,” he said.
“The plane wasn’t too good though, it’s a long flight.”
Corey said it wasn’t until many hours into the first flight that he realised there were headphones for watching movies.
“I was sitting there watching the movies in silence,” he said.
On arrival, the students played one practice game.
“We had one training session, playing this sport we’d never played, and then we had to play against these Irish kids playing Gaelic football.”
“They got their *** handed to them in the first game,” Mr O’Connor said.
Corey said at half time they swapped over to an AFL ball so they could have more of an advantage, which helped a little, but the team still lost.
“Then we went on to win every game after that,” Corey said.
“By the end of the games, they stopped putting the scores up, but our coaches kept the score.”
The teams were supposed to compete five times, though one of their games was a washout.
“With their storms they have a green card, which is like, it’s going to rain,” he said.
“Red means the whole country goes into lockdown, and that only happens every ten years or something, but we got a red.”
Mr O’Connor said coming from an Australian summer into an Irish winter was the most challenging part of the trip.
“It just got to winter when we got there, probably didn’t get to over 4 degrees the whole time,” he said.
“There were really no downers on the trip, but that cold was quite a struggle.”
Corey said he’d like to play AFL one day.
“It’d be pretty cool,” he said.
“I’d probably want to play for the Giants.”
