Beano’s toughest battle

PORTARLINGTON, Monday, 8.47pm. An evening for ducks and dogs, though the 30 players unlucky enough to be out in the deluge look more like drowned rats.

Laois and Carlow have 12 torturous minutes still to fill before full-time and Liam Hayes' men to stretch the analogy have sunk without trace long ago. Laois are firing over some nice points, but the bright lights of the dressing-rooms are attracting some wistful glances.

Not from Brian McDonald though. Mick O'Dwyer summons Paul Lawlor ashore and the few hundred onlookers huddled under the protection of the main stand roar their approval as Beano trots on.

Nine months after 'that' injury, Beano is back. Fittingly, it's on the same pitch and against the same opposition as when he broke an ankle five years previously.

You'll remember the horror of last August well, McDonald clutching his right knee in agony whilst his shattered leg twisted abnormally from the shin down. One sports physiotherapist expressed doubts as to whether he would ever play for his county again. McDonald heard the whispers, how he had been written off until 2006 at the very least.

"I got a lot of letters and phone calls from people, especially young people, wishing me well. From all over the country. Things like that helped keep me fairly upbeat. I knew I'd nothing to lose. I just didn't want to look back and think I didn't give myself every chance of playing again," he recalls.

"Initially, I'd heard all the statements going around, 'will he play again?', will he be the same player?', but then I heard about how Geordan Murphy made it back in eight months and that's what I focused on."

As it happened, McDonald missed his eight-month deadline by only two days. Ashling Poynton performed the operation on his leg in Dublin's Mater Hospital 24 hours after the Tyrone game, but four months later Gerry McEntee put him under the knife again to perform a long delayed groin procedure.

Prior to that, the recovery was going to plan. Soon after the first bout of surgery he returned to the Mater to be told that he should use the crutches as little as possible. He never bothered with them again after that.

The December operation knocked the timetable off kilter though. At the start of March, Laois selector Declan O'Loughlin said he hoped to see Beano back training around the end of May.

Instead, he was lining out for his club Arles-Killeen little over a week later. For that, he says, he has Tallaght-based physio Alan Kelly or 'the great AK' as his long and growing list of high-profile GAA clients prefer to call him to thank.

"I can see now why he's so popular with a lot of players," says McDonald. "I've been with him since January and when we started out he'd have me in a fair bit of pain, digging the elbows in everywhere. But it's because of AK that I'm back already."

He wasn't out of the woods yet, not by a long way. That first game back proved to be one step too soon. Something just didn't feel right and when he woke up in agony the next morning he knew what it was the groin. McDonald was in despair.

"That was when I got really low.

After all I'd done, I was thinking, was I going anywhere at all. The groin was giving me fierce pain. AK told me to have patience but that's never been a strong point of mine.

"We had a few more sessions together and then I played again for the club in a league game against Graiguecullen (scoring four points) and it felt much better. I knew I was improving by then because two nights before I'd done a fitness test with the county lads and I did well."

The next marker comes on Friday night when Arles-Killeen take on Portlaoise in the first round of the county, a challenge match against Roscommon follows two days later.

The trips to Tallaght have been postponed for a fortnight to see how the groin and the leg react to the increased workload. Beyond that the championship beckons, though he is taking nothing for granted.

One way or another, the physical scars will finally fade away. The mental aspect is always the trickier.

"At the time I was just so glad that someone had thought of inventing morphine. People have talked a lot about how horrific the injury looked and it was bad, I can tell you.

"The thing is, the way it happened might have actually helped me. It wasn't a tackle as such, it was just one of those freak accidents and, because of that, I haven't been nervous at all of giving or taking a tackle. I just don't think about it."

You can't blame him for that.