IT was early December when Ross McQuillan was rehabbing out of Enda King’s physiotherapy practice in Santry, trying to get to grips with nagging shin splints.
Even though his AFL club Essendon had given him and team-mate Cian McBride of Meath their blessing to play for their clubs while back home this season, McQuillan decided to stick with the rehab instead.
He recalls having a “terrible” running session and instantly felt the best place for him was back with Essendon.
“I had this knee-jerk reaction after the run and I rang Essendon up and said to them I needed to get back out and training there,” McQuillan explains.
“It’s all well and good training by yourself but I obviously wasn’t going hard enough or whatever. So anyway, the club said, no bother, and this was the start of December. They had a flight sorted for me around December 20 and I just needed to confirm it. But a couple of days before it, I thought: ‘Why am I going back?’”
The 21-year-old AFL rookie was halfway through his two-year contract with Essendon and had every intention of returning to the Melbourne club.
But that moment of clarity, and a chat with his father Martin, convinced him that his time in Australia was up. It was time to resume his Gaelic football career with Cullyhanna and Armagh. That's where he'd be happiest.
He contacted Essendon, thanked them for everything, and his one remaining year of his contract was binned. And that was that.
Before the new restrictions kicked in, he met Kieran McGeeney for a coffee in Newry about rejoining the Armagh senior squad. And that was also that.
McQuillan will be back in an Armagh jersey, doing what he was trying to do before he left for Australia – battling for a place on the Orchard team.
McQuillan strikes you as a pragmatic young man. Unlike his Essendon team-mate and Tyrone native Conor McKenna, he didn’t suffer bouts of homesickness.
His coping mechanism while “living the dream” Down Under was not watching Cullyhanna or Armagh games. He’d scroll through Twitter the following day to find out the results and who scored. But that’s as far as it went.
“When I was out there I wouldn’t have watched an Armagh game. I thought: If I get stuck watching it I’d get sucked back into it. That was kind of my thinking. So I avoided watching them,” he says matter-of-factly.
Had he been glued to the ‘live’ streams and Twitter feeds and been kicking every ball, it would have been death by a thousand cuts. He needed a clean break and wanted to give his AFL career every chance of succeeding.
“I didn’t go out with just giving it a rattle; I went out with the intention of making it, making a living. I wasn’t going out on a whim.”
He adds: “I got approached around the Championship game with Clare [in 2019] where they take you in for sessions. To be honest, I went in at the start really just to see other top players of my age and how I’d compare to them. I did the ‘Combined’ stuff and all that and I did quite well.
“When I went out to Australia the first time and got an insight into what they were doing, I was taken aback by the whole professional environment, and I hadn’t even scratched the surface. It was only when I went out the second time and I stayed with Conor McKenna and I saw how they trained.
“It was one of those situations where if you didn’t do it you’d have been thinking of the ‘what ifs’, you’re thinking you could be the next Conor McKenna. You don’t know if you don’t try it.”
He loved everything about Melbourne. But when it came to match-day, Aussie Rules didn’t give McQuillan the buzz that Gaelic Games did.
In the AFL’s season of Covid, McQuillan didn’t break into Essendon’s first team but was happy to learn his trade in the VFL [Victorian Football League], effectively a reserve team league for panellists to learn the game.
“It got you game-time and it kept you fresh. Semi-pros would have played but they would have been made up of construction workers and people like that, so the AFL didn’t want their players to be mixing with boys who were mixing with people in their workplaces and the possibility of Covid.
“So when the VFL was pulled they didn’t really know what to do with the second string boys. So we played ‘scratch’ games.
“We would play against, say, Richmond and we might only have 10 players and you need 18. So we’d have to borrow eight players from Carlton. It was always mixing and matching. It was amalgamations and was basically a run-around for the second team to get the game-time."
He adds: “I needed anything and everything. I couldn’t really be choosy. I needed experience and I needed to learn the game. They were very much into their defensive structure, and there might have been myself and Cian McBride and you could be paired off with four other defenders from different clubs, and you weren't getting to understand the system that Essendon were trying to put down. It was probably hard to learn the game but that wasn’t what drove me away from it. I just didn’t have the Grá for the game itself.”
McQuillan became firm friends with compatriots Conor McKenna and Cian McBride. After leaving Australia at the start of the pandemic and then returning to Oz again was probably the most enjoyable time he had.
He lived in an apartment with McBride and McKenna lived five minutes up the road.
Aussie Rules fans loved McKenna too. He was one of Essendon’s flair players who played with a devil-may-care attitude which endeared him to the natives.
"Conor would have tried things in the game and if they didn’t work out, he wouldn’t mind,” McQuillan explains.
“That’s very Gaelic-like because our game is so continuous. You couldn’t dent McKenna’s confidence if you tried.
“Conor has come back to Tyrone this year and looks as if he’s never been away.”
McQuillan would love to have the same dramatic impact with Armagh in 2021, but knows there are no guarantees especially given the fact he hasn’t played a game of Gaelic football in roughly 18 months.
Given his AFL experiences, does he feel more prepared for the rigors of the inter-county game, especially with Armagh competing in Division One this season, or is there a feeling of rustiness?
“A bit of both,” McQuillan replies.
“Training with a professional set-up, you’re going to put on a bit of size and I probably know my body a lot more than I did when I went to Australia. If you get an injury, you can do other stuff. That was an eye opener for me.
“I’ve learned if you’re injured then you need to be working harder than the boys who are actually on the field.
“At the same time, when you haven’t played Gaelic football for over a year, you are going to be a bit rusty, so you just want to get games under your belt. I’m going back into a top team with Armagh, a Division One team.
“It’s going to be a baptism of fire. You have to be realistic in that you’re not just going to walk back in and play. I suppose you have to be patient with yourself too.
“You have to get your touch back. It’s alright people saying: ‘You’ll walk straight into the team…’ You have expectations for yourself; nobody’s going to be harder on you than yourself. I’ll be treated like any other player in the [Armagh] set-up.”
Young Ross McQuillan is as grounded as they come. As he bids farewell to Essendon, the future is bright for the youngster.
In truth, the future was probably always orange.
