Kennelly refuses to rule out Kingdom return

Tadhg Kennelly has refused to rule out a return to inter-county Gaelic Football with his native Kerry at some point in the future.

The Sydney Swans star took a one-year break from his AFL career in 2009 to return home and win an All-Ireland title with the Kingdom, emulating his late father, Tim.

Kennelly, the only man in history to win All-Ireland and AFL Premiership medals, has one year of a two-year contract left with the Swans.

The Listowel native, who is back home in Ireland for the upcoming Irish Daily Mail International Rules Series, played 20 of 24 games with the Swans last year but insisted that a return to Gaelic football is not out of the question.

"I will never say never to anything," Kennelly said. "Look, throughout my football career I have never said no to a challenge.

"It is one of the reasons why I left and I remember I was only 16 or 17 when I got offered the opportunity and I was doing summer camps at the time with Eamon Fitzmairice and Dara Ó Cinnéide and a couple of other Kerry players.

"I was saying 'will I go' and they said to me to go, that I would be a lot fresher for the game going over.

"It was a challenge that I wanted to do. I hated it the first two years over there to be honest. I was very homesick and I hated the place but the biggest thing that drove me was the fear of not playing the game, the fear of failure and it was a challenge that I had to get over.

"After 2008, there was the challenge of trying to get on the Kerry team and get used to the game and that was a big part of me coming back to see if I could do it and then on the flip side going back again after being a year out of the game.

"To see how much it changed in a year was unbelievable and it has got a lot quicker. It was a challenge again for me and it was great to play the year out and have a good year. I never say never."

Following Kennelly's return to the AFL and the retirement of some key components of the 2009 All-Ireland winning team, Kerry lost heavily to Down in the All-Ireland quarter-final of this year's Championship, failing to make the final for the first time since 2003.

The 29-year-old admits it was tough to watch his former team-mates struggle so badly.

"I saw all the games. It is hard, six players missing from the All-Ireland final the year before is an awful lot of players. There is a lot of experience missing with Darragh (Ó Sé), Paul (Galvin) and Tomas (Ó Sé) not playing in that game against Down.

"It is huge because there was a lot of breaking ball and a lot of ball around the middle that was not won. And when you don't have a player who can come in and win that ball... Tomás is fantastic at that and Paul was fantastic at doing it and even Darragh was catching the ball and they are three huge players who will win you tough ball.

"When the game is on the line they are the players that you want and they were the three biggest losses that I could see in that game.

"Look, six finals in a row is huge and you can't expect them to be there every year and I am sure that they are going to bounce back

Meanwhile, Kennelly said he was not overly disappointed with the fall-out from the release of his autobiography last year.

Kennelly was criticised for his interpretation of an incident involving Cork's Nicholas Murphy in the 2009 All-Ireland final.

"I wrote the book. It was the way I saw it. I never once in my life went out on a field to hurt a player knowing the perception that I'm going to go out and hurt him," he said.

"What the interpretation of the book was that I came out. I said I was always going to be physically hard in the game because I'd felt Cork intimidating us in the replay down in Cork.

"I said I was going to be physically hard. I got an opportunity to hit a shoulder, yes I was high but I got an opportunity within 10 seconds to hit someone a belt of a shoulder. I was going to do that any day of the week."