At the tail end of last week, former Kerry footballer Tadhg Kennelly was at Dublin City University carrying out an important task for the Australian Football League.
As AFL Talent Coordinator, the Listowel man was on the hunt for potential Aussie Rules talent.
"We do the same thing in the US where we look at American basketball players who have just left college but haven't got drafted. We also go to New Zealand and this year Ireland. There's a big push in the AFL to try and grow the game internationally," he explained, also running through the attributes he will be assessing.
"The difficult thing is the numbers don't stack up from an Irish perspective and the game of AFL and the clubs running the game. There have been over 50 players who have gone over to play the game, there's only three that have stayed and played over 150 games."
He added that it costs a quarter of a million for a club to bring an Irish player over from an overall cost perspective.
Kennelly also believes the skill factor is not the issue with Irish players, but more so the "distance factor" in terms of playing on the other side of the globe.
