Seán Powter interview: 'For most of my career, I have felt like a solo athlete rather than a team player'
TOUGH BEAT: 'There'd be times where I just wouldn’t want to go down because it is too frustrating to watch the lads training,' says Seán Powter. Pic: Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile
It’s a brutal admission. A somewhat sad one too.
To have lived your dream, but to have done so largely in isolation. To have seen yourself less a part of the collective and more a disconnected figure.
To know that if you stuck around and continued the dream, there would again be separation and remoteness.
The late Éamonn Ryan invited 18-year-old Seán Powter into the Cork senior football panel shortly after the county’s All-Ireland U21 final defeat to Mayo in April 2016. Powter believed the call and invitation to be a prank. He didn’t believe it to be Éamonn Ryan on the other end of the phone.
It wasn’t until another Cork selector, Conor McCarthy, checked in with Powter’s mother to see if her young lad would be okay balancing the call-up with his impending Leaving Cert that this secondary school student realised he was now a Cork senior footballer.
It didn’t matter that Paul Kerrigan took him for 1-4 at his first training. It didn’t matter that his debut was a first championship defeat to Tipperary in 72 years. It didn’t matter that he had to go in and sit maths paper II the morning after said debut.
This was a teenager sharing a dressing-room with Daniel Goulding and Donncha O'Connor, childhood heroes he’d watched climb the steps in 2010.
In short, he was “living a young fellas dream”.
The dream has been paused. Not over, just packed away for now.
Powter, and his girlfriend Shannon, are off to Perth in January for at least a year. The flights were to be booked the same day we met for coffee in the corner of Douglas’ Bean & Leaf.
The resumption of the red dream is dependent on the body. The desire is still there for an 11th season to eventually follow the 10 already logged. The decision will ultimately boil down to his already heavily scrutinised durability.
Don’t mind your troublesome hamstrings, they’ve been shoved off stage by the meddlesome groin issue known as osteitis pubis. It first took up tenancy in February of last year. All notices to quit since issued by the landlord have been ignored.
Had Páirc Uí Chaoimh, not Perth, been Powter’s residence for 2026, the medical advice was that he undergo six months of rehab before a return to the playing field. And even at that, six months of meticulous mending brought no guarantee of quenching the pain that wakes him in the middle of the night.
Osteitis pubis, as Seán Powter has begrudgingly and belatedly accepted, doesn’t do timelines or roadmaps or prescribed recovery plans.
The 28-year-old doctor couldn’t commit to another season in isolation.
“For most of my career, I have felt like a solo athlete rather than a team player because I was with the physio, Brian O’Connell, the whole time, and then sporadically in with the team,” Powter explains.
“I read about the solo athlete in some book a few years ago and it just made sense. You are part of the team, but you are not part of the team.
“You are in the meetings and stuff, but the minute the group hits the pitch, you are going to the physio or the gym, and it's just you, him, and a couple of others who have injuries. And so most of the time you do feel like a solo athlete.”
For those unfamiliar with the layout of Páirc Uí Chaoimh, the gym looks out onto the 4G pitch where the Cork footballers do a great deal of their early-year training. You can be regimental in your rehab and still utterly loathe your sidelined state. Powter’s recurring sentences to that Páirc Uí Chaoimh gym chipped away at his soul.
Midweek sessions followed the same cruel pattern. Players would arrive into the dressing-room in dribs and drabs, all manner of topics would be discussed and dissected as office and teaching attire was swapped for something looser, and then, as they headed out the door, he’d go in one direction and his teammates another.
He eventually couldn’t stomach the bird's eye view of a training environment he was unable to be part of. And so, on occasion, he transferred prison.
“That is what I found the toughest, you are not part of the panel, really. You are basically a spectator while doing your own work. The pull of getting back involved is what keeps bringing you back, the enjoyment once you get back and the craic on the pitch with the lads. That is one of the main reasons I kept doing it because these are my best buddies, I love playing with them.
“And so, there is nothing worse than when the lads are going to play a training game and you are just watching. It is demoralising.
“There'd be times where I just wouldn’t want to go down because it is too frustrating to watch the lads training. I'd text Brian [O’Connell] and tell him I am doing my rehab in Douglas. I was like, I can't sit there and watch the lads again.
“I'd be lying to say the isolation wasn't tough. The first three or four hamstrings were the toughest, getting a 20-year-old's head around what is going on here. I thought I'd be back in four or five weeks. The first one took four or five months.”
His story started so differently. He was a first-team starter at Croke Park before he ever opened his Leaving Cert results.
By the end of his second season in red, he was nominated alongside Con O’Callaghan for young footballer of the year and selected on the Irish International Rules squad.
Go YouTube his goal from that year’s fourth-round qualifier against Mayo. It’s all there. The puncturing speed, the granite strength of this powerfully built pocket unit.
Seán featured in all eight of Cork’s championship games those first two years. An uninterrupted start short-lived.
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THE first of 14 hamstring tears occurred on the opening night of the 2018 League. Over the next three years, he would play in just 11 of the county’s 31 League and Championship games.
Lining out against Kerry in the 2020 Munster semi-final represented his first championship start in three years, three months, and 17 days. A man of the match return. A reminder of his pedigree and potential when unshackled by injury.
Early in our conversation, Powter admits to having never felt pride at overcoming all the many setbacks. You sign up for Cork, you do whatever is necessary to be available for duty. Self-congratulations, no thank you.
Further into a flat white, there is an about-turn on this somewhat cold approach.
“You asked me earlier did I ever feel proud at coming back from the hamstring injuries. That Kerry game was the only one where I was like, ‘you really deserve this’.
“There was no straight period where I felt, ‘Jeez, I am 100% here with this hamstring’. It was always in the back of my mind. The only time that wasn’t the case was 2020 against Kerry and Donegal last year. It was just kind of, these are days you live for, forget about the hamstring.”
A fleeting freedom. The Tuesday night before the 2020 Munster final, he was marking Damien Gore in an in-house game. The pair sprinted for possession. The hamstring popped.
Covid protocols meant only those on the matchday panel could enter Páirc Uí Chaoimh on Munster final Sunday. The semi-final man of the match and similarly injured Kevin Crowley watched the decider defeat from Brian Hurley’s couch in Togher.
“If you are at a game, and even if you’re not playing, you can get involved, but that day, you felt like you were watching a movie rather than your team playing. That was the toughest match I’ve ever watched.”
Powter asked management to report his Munster final absence as a shoulder injury. He couldn’t deal with another hamstring headline. He couldn’t deal with more pity, be it genuine or otherwise.
“At the start of my Cork career, I'd be sitting here having a coffee and people would ask me, how are the legs, rather than you had a good game at the weekend. That used to piss me off. I was in training talking about my hamstrings and then you leave and it is the only thing people ask me about. It did frustrate me.
“Brian Hurley made a good point to me. He said, people ask you how are the legs, but they don't really care. You are better off just answering with a smile, going ‘all is grand’.
“By hamstring number seven, I was just accepting of them. Brian [O’Connell] laid it out straight. He explained that the reason I am getting all these hamstring injuries is because of my speed, and because speed is so a part of my game, there’s almost a robbing Peter to pay Paul kind of thing. He was like, these will happen as long as you keep playing football.
“Brian and Aidan [Kelleher, team doctor], I’d consider them more friends. We’ve had lots of arguments, but they’ve been an unbelievable support to me.”
From 2021 to this year, he missed just one of Cork’s 24 championship games. His ever-presence, mind, often masked the cycle of chasing he found himself locked into.
At one end of this period was an All-Star nomination. At the other was a shooting pain when he put boot to ball. Momentum banked never sat for too long in his account.
“Every time I did the hamstring, it wasn't too sore, but this osteitis pubis is the sorest thing I have had. If we did a kicking drill, I'd be skipping to the back. You wake up at night because of a dart down the groin. If I sneeze, I can feel it.
“After the Donegal win in championship last year, I was crippled in training. We played Tyrone a week after, I couldn't sprint. I lasted about 40 minutes. I was dropped for the Louth game, and I just remember I was happy to be dropped because I was in so much pain.”
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The flat white is finished. The afternoon is pushing on. We don’t want to keep a fella who’s just coming off a week of night duty at the Bons.
Pain and popped hamstrings never left a whole pile of room for potential to germinate. But even in unfavourable growing conditions, Powter tended to be among the taller Cork figures each summer Sunday he was present from the off.
The lament is and was that there were far too many Sundays where his body didn’t allow him to be present. Or at least not present in the full of his potency.
“That was the question I used to always ask myself, do you feel frustrated with not reaching your full potential with these injuries?
“If I didn't have the injuries, I don't know where I'd be now, and I don't like thinking about that because the first two or three years with Cork, I thought we were going to win All-Irelands, but I feel like I have reached my potential with the injuries, if that makes sense.”
It's an answer he clearly believes can be amended and improved. Otherwise, this would be a retirement chat, not a bye for now conversation.
“It would have been easy enough to say I am done with Cork, but I feel I have unfinished business there. The only reason I’ve stepped away is due to getting the groin right because I know if I was sticking around and I saw the lads going back in training for pre-season, I'd be like, ‘I am grand’ and I would do the exact same thing I did this year which was to try and play through the pain rather than pull out of training for an extended period to give the body a break.
“The plan is to play a bit in Australia, once I have done my six months of rehab, and just see if I can play pain free and if I can get back enjoying playing football because last year, on the field, I wasn't enjoying it because of the pain.”
It was the end of last month when he typed his parting message into the Cork WhatsApp group. He didn’t hang around for the replies. He removed himself immediately after pressing send.
The decision to pause his red dream was now a reality. There were tears.
There have been tears in the past. Powter rebounded time and again. That WhatsApp group mightn’t have seen the last of him.
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