These are the tough weeks as an AFL player. Pre-season. The stories of brutally tough regimes are legendary, like the time Cork’s Colin Corkery was asked to run 100m during his time with Carlton. The catch? He had to do it 100 times in a row.
Colin O’Riordan is smack bang in the middle of his pre-season at the moment with the Sydney Swans. He should be finding it a little easier than normal given he was at the peak of his powers only a couple of months ago, winning a Munster medal with Tipperary and earning an All-Star nomination. But even he is feeling it.
“To be honest with you, it’s probably everything you’ve read about, and a bit more,” he admits. “And that’s not me blowing my own trumpet or anything, it’s next level stuff. It’s easy to go in and do a couple of sessions – when you realise it goes on for maybe six, eight, 10 weeks, that’s probably the hardest thing of all.”
Depending on how things pan out in the AFL this year, this could be O’Riordan’s last experience of the gruelling regime.
He’s only got a season left on his contract with the Swans and while they’d probably build a statue in his honour back home in Tipp, the 2011 All-Ireland minor winner still has plenty to prove in the oval ball game.
Recruited in late 2015, he made his AFL debut in 2018, featured 12 times in 2019 though was only used on eight occasions last year.
There are probably a few in Tipp hoping that it’ll all simply peter out for O’Riordan Down Under and that he’ll return home later this year and resume his inter-county career.
“It’s pretty much a decision that the club will make, obviously everyone has their own agents over here so your agent will have a discussion with the club and that’s just the way it works,” said O’Riordan. “It’ll probably be the end of the year, we’ll have a discussion about it and go from there.”
The pressure is on then to perform in 2021?
“You’d be pretty naive or pretty stupid if you didn’t think that it wouldn’t bring added pressure,” acknowledged the JK Brackens man. “The chips are down for me and this year is going to be a big year and that’s the reality. There’s no point sugar-coating it and saying you’re going to be here for another 10 years when you’re only contracted for one.
“So you have to be realistic but at the same time you have to be ambitious and think you’re going to be here for five more years. In the back of my mind I’m thinking I really want to succeed at this game and prove people wrong who thought you couldn’t do it.
“You just want to have a real crack at it and I have a real desire to succeed with the club and that’s the biggest thing for me. I just want to play over here for as long as I can.”
If it sounds like O’Riordan has privately consigned himself to inter-county retirement with Tipp, that’s not the case either.
“You’re writing me off, I’m only 25!” he smiled. “Jeez, I don’t think I’ve closed the book yet, I hope I haven’t anyway.”
Losing to Mayo as they did at Croke Park last December has maybe left O’Riordan with an itch he’d like to scratch. Whilst his brief GAA investment over winter yielded a monstrous return – silverware and, potentially, an All-Star – it still ended in disaster and that five-goal shellacking.
Burning desire
“We felt like we embarrassed ourselves against Mayo,” he said. “There is a lot of hurt coming from the group with regard to that. We had such a high against Cork and such a low against Mayo. We were pretty much gone out of the game by half-time and I think there is a burning desire to succeed again because of that. That is the vibe I’m getting from the group and from chatting to a few of the lads, they feel like they want to push on.”
O’Riordan is speaking at the launch of Sports Physio Ireland’s new Athletic Development App for GAA club teams, alongside former Dublin hurler Joey Boland.
“The second I saw it I said, ‘I wish I had this when I was younger’ because mobility, stretching, strength, these are all the things that probably get neglected,” said O’Riordan of Boland’s app.
O’Riordan spent two weeks in a hotel room recently doing precisely those things, stretching and strengthening, as he used his period of quarantine to gear up for the punishing pre-season. Then he was spat back out into regular, often mask-less society.
“I don’t want to jinx it now or anything but it’s as if it doesn’t exist,” he said of the Covid threat. “I think Victoria had 26 Covid-free days up until the other day and when there is a case, it’s only one or two and they get on top of it straight away. It’s pretty strict but that’s what lets us live the way we are.”
* Colin O'Riordan was speaking at the launch of Sports Physio Ireland's new Athletic Development App for GAA Club Teams. Click the link below to register for your free session https://sportsphysioireland.com/online-fitness-platform/athletic-development/
