Let the great world spin.
A couple of days after he had tormented Kerry in the Munster minor football final, 18 years ago, Ciáran Sheehan answered a call from a number he didn’t recognise. The voice on the line spoke with an Australian accent, offering a new life on the other side of the world, or something crazy like that.
He introduced himself as an agent for Australian Rules Football, a talent-spotter making a cold call. Sheehan was just 16, and because of his age the agent had no right to contact him directly, but Sheehan was brilliant, and in the business of recruitment, protocols are the enemy of speed; speed wins.
Sheehan and his mother Liz met him in Cork city one Saturday morning, to hear his pitch. Everything about it was dazzling. “Essentially, he offered me a contract there and then, just like that,” says Sheehan. “They were willing to take a risk on bringing an Irish athlete over and they wanted to do it.”
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The other young player in their sights at the time was Zach Tuohy, who was a year older than Sheehan. During the Christmas holidays they spent four days in Melbourne as guests of Carlton, having their eyes filled with wonder.
Liz convinced her son to complete his Leaving Cert first, but in the summer after his exams Sheehan and Tuohy returned to Melbourne for a training block, escalating the courtship to an exchange of vows. The Carlton CEO hosted them as guests in his pool house and the club exposed the young men to a battery of tests and a programme of assimilation. This was it: jump; fly.
“We both kind of had contracts signed by the end of that and I was due to come back out for pre-season, but I didn’t go back at that stage. Whether it was homesickness or whatever it was. My mam was at home on her own and it was always just the two of us growing up. Just me and my mam. My dad was not on the scene. I just never knew him.
“My mam had a lot of siblings, and we were a very close family. We both lived with my grandparents for the first eight years of my life, but Mam built her own house about 1998-99, so leaving her in the house on her own was a bit of a thing for me.”
At home, the world was still at his feet. Sheehan’s talent was a coat of many colours. He had been a Cork minor hurler too, and when the time came the Cork senior hurlers beckoned him down their yellow brick road.
After he came home from Australia in 2009, though, he won a football All-Ireland with the Cork U-21s and the Cork senior footballers pounced. When Cork won the senior All-Ireland a year later, Sheehan was the youngest player on the field in the final, two months shy of his 20th birthday. In his young life in sport, this was the only speed he knew. On every team, he arrived early and just in time.
“I never felt like I was the youngest [on that Cork panel]. I never felt like I was the baby of the group. I did feel ready at 19. You kind of just fell into the culture. I suppose I got a lot of my maturity from them because they were so balanced. If anyone was going off boasting they were humbled pretty quickly.
“I remember in the final, once the game started, I was just playing off the cuff. But in the semi-final against Dublin, I was overwhelmed. I was taken off five or 10 minutes into the second half. It was just the complete shock of the atmosphere. I would never have over-thought anything but the whole occasion got to me. The biggest thing for me between then and the final was that I had a point to prove.”
Carlton made contact again after the All-Ireland, thinking that maybe he was satisfied now and open to suggestion, but he had started in college by then and was up to his neck in football and hurling. In CIT he played Fitzgibbon Cup and Sigerson Cup and was chairman of the GAA club, all at once. In other hands, it might have been a scene from Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares, with lids flying off pots, but he was used to doing stuff at full stretch.
“You grew up thinking you want to play for Cork. That was the dream. I was motivated by winning more All-Irelands.” He stayed put.
[ Daire Cregg: I didn’t grow up wearing a Carlton jerseyOpens in new window ]
At the end of 2013, though, he travelled to Australia with the International Rules squad and won Player of the Series against an indigenous All-Star team. Carlton tried again. This time, he changed his mind.
Sheehan had just turned 24 and for most of his life being precocious had been part of his identity. In Éire Óg, his home club 10 miles west of the city, he had started playing for adult teams when he was 15 years of age. Nobody ever thought he might not be good enough.
In Australia, though, everything was alien to his experience. As a footballer, his reputational capital was frozen in another account on the other side of the world.
As much as it sounds great, it’s dog-eat-dog. The big difference I noticed was the isolation at times. It’s not the same as the GAA where a fellah might put his arm around you
— Ciáran Sheehan
“One of the challenges was being uncomfortable. After all the work you do to get to a certain stage in your career [as a GAA player] and then you go way back down to the bottom. You have to prove yourself again. It was the next challenge.”
At Carlton, he was Rookie of the Year in his first season and after just 14 games in the reserves, they gave him his first team debut. Liz flew from Ireland to be there; left on Thursday, flew home on Monday. To Melbourne.
For GAA players, being a professional is the forbidden fruit. Not every bite of the apple is the same. At the end of Sheehan’s second season, Carlton cut 15 players from their playing roster and culled the same number at the end of 2016; Sheehan ran the gauntlet of those clear-outs.
“As much as it sounds great, it’s dog-eat-dog. The big difference I noticed was the isolation at times. You’re trying to find your way, and there was a good Irish network out there, but you’re kind of left to your own devices in many ways. You kind of tend to go into your own bubble.
“It’s not the same as the GAA where a fellah might put his arm around you. Whereas over there, you’re talking about contracts and renewing contracts and coming to the end of contracts and it becomes very self-absorbed. For me, the injuries were the biggest thing, that was the real isolation.”
The injuries started at the beginning of 2015 and that season was a write-off. He had negotiated a contract extension at the end of his rookie year, but at the end of year two the ground shifted under his feet. In the close season they gave him a series of targets to meet – for lifting weights, for body fat percentage, for doing a 2K time trial – to prove his athletic capability for the next season.
“I was given all these targets not knowing whether I’d have a contract for the following year. I found myself negotiating a bit with the club myself and not kind of getting the support I needed. It happens in every sport where you have an agent that’s looking after lots of players and they’re going to prioritise the big money players. So, that was hard. I had one or two people advising me but the advice from them wasn’t very solid, looking back now.”
The injuries, though, were merciless and debilitating. In all, he had eight surgeries on his knees and four on his hips; his hamstring tendon was torn off the bone and he suffered a stress fracture in his foot. When he was picked against Adelaide towards the end of the 2017 season, he had gone more than 1,000 days without a start in the first team.
“You build a kind of resilience and kind of just get on with things and not dwell on them. You’re forced into doing it that way because sport won’t wait for you and the club won’t wait for you and the players won’t wait for you. So, you just have to keep pushing and pushing and pushing. Was it tough? Absolutely. Very tough at times. There are times when you question what are you doing here? Let’s get back home.
“But I was never going to up and leave halfway through an injury. I was going to get myself right before I made any decision.”
At the end of 2018 Carlton took the decision out of his hands. Amy, his girlfriend then and his wife now, had been with him in Australia from the start and they decided to stay for another while. Sheehan continued to play for a semi-pro team and took a job with the AFL’s version of the GPA, helping players who were exiting that life.
“There’s a lot of hardship – alcohol abuse, gambling problems – particularly for guys that were coming out of the game. You know, that loss of identity.”
In 2019 Sheehan came home. The Cork footballers immediately gravitated towards him. He tried to make a comeback, but his bad knee caved in again. He carried on for Éire Óg as best he could and won a couple of county titles in a golden period for the club. But the physical act of kicking a football in competition had become unsustainable.
When they arrived home, they put down roots in Shanagarry, a small village in east Cork where Amy was from. Russell Rovers, the local club, asked him to do some coaching, and maybe they were hoping for a conversion. Through that nick they entered his bloodstream.
In 2023, Sheehan hurled for their junior team; at the end of that year Donal Óg Cusack, from the next parish, was appointed coach. Glory flared up. Russell Rovers are in the All-Ireland club junior hurling final this weekend for the second time in five years. Sheehan is captain. Cusack drove them.
“With Donal Óg, there are no blurred lines. It’s black and white. There’s commitment and there’s not commitment. Such a simple thing can have a huge impact on a group of players – looking at a fellah in the eye and calling him out.”
“For me, that burning desire to win is what fuels the whole thing. It’s something you can’t hide. It’s always there.”
The last time Sheehan played in Croke Park was in 2013, an All-Ireland quarter-final in which Dublin smothered Cork. So much is different in his life now, so much has happened.
But the great world spun. And he landed here, again.
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