Young Irish players, and parents, to get taste of what AFL offers
Peter Hanlon | June 13, 2008
AUSTRALIAN football's global star search is set to intensify with a virtual draft camp to be held in Ireland in August featuring the best young Gaelic footballers with designs on a career in the AFL.
Player manager Ricky Nixon will this morning meet officials from Geelong, St Kilda, Richmond, North Melbourne and Brisbane Lions, who have paid $30,000 each to be the inaugural member clubs in what is essentially a national Irish recruiting scheme.
Nixon hopes their reward will be almost immediate.
"I'm pretty determined to get each of our original member clubs a good player in the first 12 months; I'm committed to that," Nixon said yesterday.
"If we don't it will be because the system doesn't work and the pool's not there, but I very much doubt that, given the footage I've seen in the last 24 hours. It's very exciting what some of these kids are going to be doing off half-back flanks or a wing in the next few years."
While talent-spotting in Ireland is nothing new to AFL football — nine Irishmen feature on 2008 club lists — Nixon's project would intensify the search to an unprecedented level. When he lands in Ireland in a fortnight, he will join a group of seven heading up the project at that end, including Lion Colm Begley's brother Joe, plus an elite junior coach, a sports psychologist, a university professor, an Australian expat who played in the VFL, and an ex-AFL teammate of Nixon's.
"I've already heard that one club person has heard I'll be in Ireland for a month and jumped on a plane," he said of the concern his plan has created among clubs who have preferred to go it alone.
"Clubs here feel like they've been doing it, but they know they haven't been doing it well. Not only that, they're fearful of who we might have on our list, and that this cartel is going to be far more attractive to a player than just one club going to see them."
A group of 20 to 30 Gaelic footballers aged 17 to 22, but mostly in the 17 to 19 bracket, will be invited to attend a camp in either Dublin or Belfast in August. Their parents will also be invited, with presentations made on all things AFL as well as life in Australia.
"This is a massive step forward compared to one club going over there and saying, 'Come to Australia, we'll look after you'," Nixon said.
The groundwork for drawing up a list of 100 prospective draftees has been made easier by using software from Swedish company Dartfish, which AFL clubs have already used as a teaching tool, but which in this instance has been applied to footage from GAA games to form a database of players.
"The software tags whatever you want — kicks, marks, handballs, shots on goal, etc. It will enable us to call up, say, Bill Murphy from Dublin, and if you click on 'kicks', footage of all of his kicks will come up one after the other. You don't need the whole game.
"We've got 100 players listed, full profiles on them, and we've ranked the first 15 to 20.
"We've identified a No. 1 draft pick — he's very quick, six foot three (191 centimetres), a Tadhg Kennelly type but a bit bigger."
Nixon said he had encountered resistance from GAA clubs and officials fearful of losing prime talent, and he hoped to meet them while in Ireland. He would tell them: "Anyone we take out of there will be a good chance to play AFL footy, as opposed to the amount who come across here now and end up playing VFL or in the suburbs."
AFL clubs are allowed no more than two international players on their lists.
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