He might have grown up with brown and gold blood running through his veins, but Kade Kolodjashnij wants nothing more than to beat the team he has barracked for since childhood. 

Born into a family of one-eyed Hawthorn supporters, the No. 5 draft pick out of the 2013 draft said has had a long-term relationship with the brown and gold. 

“I actually went for them my whole life,” Kolodjashnij confessed to SUNS TV.

“It’s was always a family tradition growing up, to always go for Hawthorn.

As a junior football player growing up in Launceston, Kolodjashnij lived just minutes away from Aurora Stadium, the Hawks’ home-away-from-home outside of the MCG.

Through their commercial partnership with Tasmania, the Hawks now play four times a year on the Apple Isle, and Kolodjashnij says he never missed a game in his years as one of Tassie’s most promising draft prospects.

“They would play at Aurora Stadium a few times a year so I used to go down there a fair bit,” he said.

In the lead-up to his 2013 draft intake, much was made by AFL draft analysts on the incredible similarities between the 18-year-old and the Hawks’ two-time premiership player Grant Birchall.

Kolodjashnij says many, if not all the games he watched as a rising junior football player in Tasmania, were spent analysing and studying the 2012 All- Australian half-back. 

“The last couple of years I’ve watched him a lot, especially when he came down to Tasmania,” he said.

He spent a week training at Hawthorn mid-way through their 2013 premiership-winning season as part of his AIS-AFL Academy scholarship, where he closely watched Birchall in his elite training environment.

The young Gold Coast player says he is looking forward to sharing the playing field with his long-time football hero.

“I really like the way he plays and goes about it,” he said.

“Just how he defends, and how he creates that counter attack off half-back.”