Mellow Conor McKenna seeks Grand Final triumph in Bohemian Rhapsody
Special players just seem to have a catalogue of special moments to call upon. Conor McKenna is no different.
Here, people will point to his two-goal salvo to dump Kerry out of the All-Ireland race in 2021, but in Australia, they see a guy who kicked a goal with his very first play on his debut for Essendon nine years ago and look to the man who kicked a superb goal in the semi-final win for Brisbane against Carlton last weekend.
On Saturday, the Irish man will be aiming to round off an incredible season in the perfect fashion as the Lions take on Collingwood in the 2023 AFL Grand Final.
The Tyrone man’s run to this point of his sporting life hasn’t been easy. A three-game ban for biting, a media witch-hunt after a Covid test that led to a postponed AFL game and the almost never-ending yearning for home life in Ireland. Bumps, there’s been a few.
But the 27-year-old has come through it all and when everything is said and done, he’ll maybe wonder what the big deal was all about anyway.
The final will be hosted at the famed Melbourne Cricket Ground, one of the biggest sporting attractions not only in the city, but the entire world with a capacity of 100,024 and over a century and a half of sporting history.
For McKenna though, his eyes would naturally be drawn nine kilometres out the road to Flemington Racecourse, the host venue of the Melbourne Cup.
McKenna didn’t grow up wanting to be the next Peter Canavan, he grew up wanting to be the next Tony McCoy.
His family trained horses for generations, his father Pat still does. Ultimately too heavy to be a jockey, McKenna has dabbled in owning horses. One under his banner for a while was called No Speed Limit – a fitting summation of his sporting prowess.
Gaelic football or Aussie Rules, the Eglish man doesn’t seem to be confined by boundaries.
Perhaps it’s due to his nonchalance towards the serious side of the game – or games in his case – but McKenna shuts down the outside noise and marches to the beat of his own drum.
“Almost Bohemian like,” Mickey Donnelly tells RTÉ Sport about the player that he managed for three years with the Tyrone minors.
It was under Donnelly’s tutelage that McKenna’s name came to prominence.
In the third of those, in 2014, he was called up to the Tyrone senior squad by Mickey Harte at a time when Australian clubs were starting to circle.
It was the year before though, when Tyrone made it all the way to the All-Ireland final, that Red Hand fans started to get truly excited by this raw young talent from Eglish.
Despite McKenna’s 1-03 from play, Tyrone actually lost the Ulster final to Monaghan in a Clones thriller but responded with wins over Kerry – after extra-time – and Roscommon to set up a final date with Mayo where the Westerners prevailed at Croke Park.
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