‘To be here now and getting pictures with the family is unreal. I think it’s the first time I cried after a win in my life’

An AFL hopeful, his time in that code is now done. However, being signed by the Sydney Swans in 2019 sent his life off in an entirely different orbit.

Up to that point, he was set for a life of hurling and football with St Martin's, carrying on a famous name alongside his cousins, Rory and Jack. He took the road less travelled and was on the books of the Swans before moving to crosstown rivals Greater Western Sydney Giants, but last weekend he was home to help St Martin's win last Sunday's Wexford SHC final.

"I've had a really great sporting journey the last five or six years, but you miss it. There's no other way of putting it," O'Connor said. "I'm so proud of my cousins, Rory and Jack, and the lads who play for Wexford and the lads who play here. You really miss being out there with them."

He had been preparing for this day, hurling in a local dog park in Sydney. Absence from St Martin's has definitely made the heart grow fonder.

"I'm just so happy, it's been a great day. You try not to make it all about the result because there's more to life than just winning and you'd do your head in if you came home from the other side of the world just to win.

"But I'd be lying if I said this wasn't special. You try and imagine these things when you're very far away, but it's very hard to visualise.

"I was doing a bit of hurling training with the club in Sydney in a dog park for a couple of weeks before I returned.

"To be here now and getting pictures with the family is unreal. I think it's the first time I cried after a win in my life, that says a lot. It's gone just exactly as I wanted it to go."

He will return to Australia soon, but after scoring a goal in Sunday's success over St Anne's, he plans to hang around long enough to play against Kildare champions Naas on November 17.

"I've been living in Sydney five years in October. I'm not playing footie professionally any more and I've got my life over there now. I won't be there forever, I do want to come home eventually.

"I said to myself last December that I was going to come home and play club championship and I was going to throw everything out the window for that, so I actually finished up the job I was in. I was playing with a footie team in Sydney, at a similar level to this. It was like a Sydney League, kind of like part-time or semi-pro.

"I told them at the start of the season that I was going home in

June or July to play a bit of hurling and spend some time with my family and it's all worked out really well now.

"I will be going back eventually, you can't put your life on hold forever. There's more to life than sport, I've got a partner and friends and all sorts out there."

His partner, Helen Housby, is also a gifted sports star and plays professional netball. "She's an English girl. She's a world-class netball player. It's a Commonwealth sport, so we don't know much about it over here, it's big over there. She flew over today. She was in an international camp over the weekend, so she's flying back at, like, six on Monday morning. She'll have a pint or two of Guinness with us and then she'll go. It's nice to have her here," O'Connor said after the game on Sunday.

"These kinds of things are not to be sniffed at, it's a really special thing. It's our third since 2017, but it feels like the first. It's really emotional after the game. It doesn't get old these sort of feelings.

"We have this sort of narrative in Wexford that we've underachieved and that sort of drives you on as well and then there's the family element. There's so many guys here you'd be so so close with it and there's nothing in the world or in sport that compares to it."