In an extract from his new autobiography, Zach Tuohy remembers the 2007 minor season with Laois and the key moments that saw him spotted by Australian Rules scouts.
In 2007, we opened our minor campaign against Kilkenny.
For those reading who aren’t fortunate enough to call themselves Irish, let me explain. Kilkenny is a wonderful hurling county, one of the best ever, but, quite frankly, they are a deplorable footballing county. I mean awful.
We did, however, prepare for them diligently, as we did for every team. With professionalism and attention to detail. We were ready for them to at least put up a fight and, maybe, they were hoping to catch us off guard and cause an upset.
That didn’t happen. We thrashed them by 26 points (4–20 to 0–6) and, for my Australian friends, that’s about as big a margin as you’re ever likely to see in a game of football. But
the real stuff was about to begin.
We played Dublin next. After normal time, it was a draw, and I had been subbed off late in the piece. I was shattered.
I don’t think I’d ever been subbed off before, but there you have it. When the game went into extra-time, I was subbed back on. That doesn’t happen often, but I made the most of
it. The scores were tied after extra-time.
We defeated Dublin comfortably in the replay when I was redeployed as an attacking half-back. Having played most of the championship at centre-forward, this, at the time, felt
like a slight demotion.
But the switch may have played an integral part in getting me drafted to the AFL.
That year, we went on to win the minor Leinster title, beating Carlow in the final. It was during this Leinster final that I scored what would turn out to be the most important
point of my life.
Early in the game, I caught one of our own kickouts well inside our defensive half, and I just took off. I managed to sprint away from a couple of would-be tacklers, carrying the ball the entire way up to the opposing 13-metre line, before spinning away from one final attempted tackle and kicking it over the bar.
It was a lovely point, even if I do say so myself, but I had no idea at the time just how much that point was going to change my life.
We defeated Roscommon in the All-Ireland quarter-final and were drawn to face Derry in the semi-final. Derry was leading for most of the game that day. From half-back, I managed to push forward and get a goal, followed up by a 45 (a free kick from 45 metres).
My offensive game was firing but, as we entered added time at the end of the match, we were still four points adrift. Nothing but a goal was going to get us back into this.
I remember rolling forward and receiving a looping hand pass from Conor Meredith, another player who would try his hand at an AFL career, spending two years with North
Melbourne.
I stepped inside the chasing Derry defender and beat two more in front of me to kick it into the top right-hand corner of the net. It went in as fast as a bullet, so much so the goalkeeper barely moved, he had no chance.
It ended up being goal of the year, and it was easily the best goal I’d ever scored in Gaelic football, at a pretty handy time too.
My teammate Donal Kingston scored a brilliant individual point moments later to force the game to a replay.
In the replay, I was selected in the forward half, but it wasn’t our day. We allowed Derry to score a few sloppy goals in the first half, and we gave ourselves too much work to do in the second half.
Immediately after the game, I was awarded the Bobby Miller Man of the Match for my performances over the two semi-final games.
Not long after the minor intercounty campaign had drawn to a close, we played in a blitz-style tournament with the Portlaoise minors in Dunboyne in Meath.
If the Under-16 county final a couple of years earlier had been the beginning of my journey towards self-belief, then this tournament was the destination.
There were Under-18 teams from all over Ireland, and the legendary Meath football coach Seán Boylan was there too. It was a 13-a-side format – I remember that because it
felt like there was always space for me to run into, I had so much freedom.
This tournament capped off what had been a transformative season for me. I was playing midfield, catching kickouts and running the length of the field to score.
We absolutely destroyed every team we played that day, and won the tournament outright. I was given the Player of the Tournament award, and it’s no exaggeration to say that I’d arrived.
This was who I was now – a bona fide athlete. Most importantly, I believed it.
My former coach, Mick Lillis, who was in charge at the time, also recalls this tournament as the standout moment of my junior career.
By now, he was completely convinced that I had the potential to achieve something special. Of course, doing that on the other side of the world wasn’t on his radar – or mine – just yet.
A few days later, our house phone rang.
What I didn’t know, as I walked into the hallway to answer it, was that this phone call would change my life forever.
