MARTY Clarke was a straight-A student at his school in Kilkeel, County Down. He had qualified for entrance to Queen’s University, Belfast, but was uncertain of what career to pursue when Collingwood recruiter Derek Hine came knocking at his door.

Clarke knew he was good at football. A lot of people in Ireland knew it, hence the headlines following his departure from that country about AFL raiding parties.

He’d won an under-18 title with County Down. His school, despite being small, had made three All-Ireland finals in the school competition. They hadn’t won, but it was remarkable they got there.

He played centre-forward — the equivalent to centre halfforward in our game. He was a creative playmaker.

When I ask him the best player he’s seen in the Australian version of the game, he says — like a shot — "Didak".

A moment later, he adds Gary Ablett, but it is to Didak he returns. "I love the creative mind," he says.

I gather Clarke plays Irish football something like Didak plays Australian rules.

In Irish football, he points out, there’s so much you can do with the round ball without stepping in any direction. In Australian rules, he says, you have to "straighten up".

You certainly do if you drop the ball on to your boot as precisely as Clarke does. Like a needle being dropped on to an old vinyl record. He’s only been playing the game two years and he’s Collingwood’s designated kicker.

I ask him if he feels nerves.

"No. I don’t think I’d play if I did."

Last year’s match of the season, played before 98,000 people, was between Collingwood and Geelong. Clarke was one of the Magpies’ best. He had then been playing the game for precisely one year.

Clarke’s nickname at Collingwood is Irish. He says "at a push" he would identify as Irish but when he writes "NI" on his arm before a game, it stands for Northern Ireland.

I ask him if he remembers the civil war in that province remembered as "the troubles".

"Oh, yes," he says. Clarke grew up Catholic in a town that was 70% Protestant. He knew what pubs you didn’t go into, what streets you didn’t walk down.

He remembers the day of the Omagh bombing, a fine day towards the end of summer and a Catholic holy day. "Twenty-nine people were killed," he says.

"But it was the beginning of the end."

But he doesn’t want to talk about Irish history. "I’m one for moving on."

He has Protestant friends back home. Not only that, they now barrack for Collingwood.

Clarke is writing a weekly column in an Irish newspaper, the Irish Daily Star. In one he sought to explain the Anzac Day game.

"Australia is a very new nation and any bit of history they have they take very seriously," he wrote.

The virtue of Clarke’s footy column is that he tells Australian rules stories you don’t hear in Australia.

Here’s a good example: "As last year was my first Anzac Day our full-back and popular changing-room character Shane Wakelin suspected that Mick Malthouse, being the shrewd historian-head coach that he is, would quiz me about Anzac Day. So Shane took it upon himself to educate me on this great day of remembrance for all Australians.

And when his hunch that Mick would ask me if I knew anything about the day came to pass, I was able to impress the coach with a detailed answer!

Mick claimed that even he hadn’t heard some of the facts I was relaying to him. Later in the year, we told him that Shane and I had studied these facts earlier in the week and he just shook his head and said, ‘Wakelin, I should have known!’."

Clarke’s first sight of Australian rules was the 2005 Sydney v West Coast grand final, which received a lot of media attention in Ireland because of the Swans’ Tadhg Kennelly.

He remembers the news clip featuring Kennelly’s late goal and the jig the man from Kerry danced on the dais after receiving his premiership medal.

I ask Clarke what he thought about the game. "I thought fair play to the feller from Kerry."

When Collingwood came to call, he was still at school.

He had previously been invited to attend an AFL training camp in Limerick two years earlier. Two contracts were then on offer with the Brisbane Lions and he set himself to get one of them.

At school, his favourite subject was geography. He has a great desire to travel, asking me at one point if I’ve been to central Asia. There’s a train trip he wants to do from Moscow to Beijing.

He also knew his talent as a footballer relative to the other boys who attended the AFL training camp at Limerick university.

He did well in all the tests and, almost immediately, mastered the art of kicking.

Having watched his instructors closely, he deduced the art of kicking the odd-shaped ball was "all in the drop" — the passage of the ball from hand to foot.

If you wish to have some idea of Clarke’s skill with the oval ball, get on the internet site Youtube and type in his name and the word "juggling".

There’s a 20-second clip of him keeping a Sherrin in the air using only his feet and knees in the way that soccer players keep a round ball aloft. It is a non-stop display of balance, timing and nimble feet.

He didn’t get either of the two contracts with Brisbane. That was the end of the Australian experiment for him.

When a letter came inviting him to a second camp in Dublin, he didn’t even bother opening it. He wasn’t going just to make up the numbers.

Then Collingwood’s Derek Hine arrived at his door. Hine spoke Clarke’s language — that is, he understood Gaelic football — and saw what parts of Clarke’s game, particularly his ability to read the play and general awareness, would translate into Australian rules.

In July 2006, he arrived in Australia for the first time. His impression of Melbourne was that it was more Americanised than he had expected. More freeways, more franchise stores. The MCG was "massive".

The first game he saw was between Richmond and Collingwood. The two centre half-forwards — that is, the two players in the position he assumed he would play — were Matthew Richardson and Chris Tarrant. He saw their size. Did it daunt him? "It did a bit."

Nonetheless, he returned in September 2006 and set about adapting to the game. His first practice match was against Sydney. It was also the first time he’d been tackled.

He found he "enjoyed" that part of the game and sought to learn more about it from two teammates, Scott Burns and Paul Licuria.

By now, Clarke was in the process of becoming a Collingwood footballer — that is, one tutored in the Malthouse philosophy of the game.

You can’t help but wonder what sort of player Clarke would be had he gone to, for example, the Bulldogs and been coached by Rodney Eade.

Towards the end of his first season, Clarke was comprehensively shirtfronted.

Sydney’s Amon Buchanan, who fired into him from close range like a human cannonball, was suspended for one match as a result.

Clarke, who didn’t see him coming, was left "dazed and winded".

He felt the after-effects for several days, but was off the playing field for only four minutes. (The collision led to the following exchange on an Irish football blog site. First voice: "Sweet jesus that was some tackle all right. Fair play to him for taking a hit like that and not letting it affect him!" Second voice: "Jesus was that a tackle? It looked more like an assault.")

Did the incident put him off, I ask. "No," he replies, with a short shake of his head.

On the same Irish blog site, Wakelin is quoted as saying Clarke is a future captain of Collingwood.

Having met Clarke, I believe it. He is bright, ambitious and confident. But in one of his columns he reveals what makes him nervous. Driving in Melbourne.

"Coming from a small place like Cranfield, outside Kilkeel, means that a loose sheep on the road represents a risk and a busy road. Here in a city of four million people, it’s a different story. Countless traffic lights, traffic jams, speed cameras, hostile drivers, endless traffic wardens and more tram tracks than I could shake a stick at, makes driving in Melbourne a terrible task," he wrote.

He writes of finding out one Monday that he had to meet a man in the city on Thursday.

"That’s when the butterflies started circulating in my stomach. How will I get there? Where will I park? How long should I leave myself to get there in time? These are all the things I was asking myself. Sure enough I buckled under the pressure. I arrived 15 minutes late, after driving past the meeting place twice.

I almost crashed twice. And to add insult to injury an $80 parking fine was waiting on me when I got back to my car."

Then there’s the matter of his accent. In his first month at the club, every time he asked one particular trainer for a Powerade he received a pair of boots. Eventually, he got Paul Medhurst to translate.

Medhurst orders for him when they go out for a meal. In the past, he has ordered a Fanta and received a plate of French fries. He says hearing the South Armagh accent of Collingwood’s new Irish recruit, Kevin Dyas, has been a comfort.

At the end of last season, Clarke returned to Ireland and played two games with his local club, An Riocht ("the kingdom" in Gaelic), helping them to a county premiership.

Having put on nine kilograms to play AFL, he initially felt heavy in his movements and the round ball was strangely alien to him. But in the second match he was among An Riocht’s best.

Will he play Irish football when he goes home again this year? "No. They’ve been eliminated already."

Clarke is, as he says, "still only 20".

Of life in general, he says: "I’ve always taken the scenic route." He’s contracted to Collingwood until the end of 2009 and then for player and club it’s decision time.

"The big difficulty for me is that I’m not as good at AFL as I am at Irish football. I’m not a main player, I’m not a creative forward. I’d love to become a player like Didak."

He stresses that Collingwood will have its own thoughts on the matter, but, for him, the question as to whether he’s here "for the long haul" comes down to this — "I’ll stay if I think I can be as good a player in this game as I am in the Gaelic game."