From Shaneomania to a year on treatment table
If Shane O’Donnell was hurling’s billboard act in 2013, then Shaneomania barely registered at the tail end of the charts this summer.
From All-Ireland victory banquets, Late Late Show appearances and boyband speculation to a year spent on the treatment table. A double hamstring tear followed by a fractured finger, the miseries endured by the 20-year old.
It meant his senior championship season was written off while his U21 involvement has been stop-start at best. The last three weeks of training represented his first uninterrupted run inside the whitewash since early spring. Certainly not the sequel Shane O’Donnell had envisaged when rattling the net on three occasions in last year’s All-Ireland SHC final replay.
Perched in the sitting room last Sunday watching Kilkenny and Tipperary, a most “jealous and envious” observer, it hit home how seismic the landscape had shifted over the past 12 months.
So where did the script first run off course?
You’d hardly believe it, but O’Donnell’s troubles can be traced back to a Strictly Come Dancing session last April.
“To be honest everything was going well at the time,” recalls O’Donnell.
“While I was playing Fitzgibbon Cup I was struggling with time management because I had league on the go as well and I had a couple of assignments due. When the Fitzgibbon and my assignments were through everything started to click. The Waterford league game went very well (O’Donnell tallied a tidy 2-2) and I just felt this was going to be a good year, my hurling was fantastic. It was literally the last minute of training when I tore my hamstring. And it just all went downhill from here. We were preparing for a Strictly Come Dancing fundraiser the day before that, we had done a couple of hours training and my hamstring was being used in ways it wouldn’t have been used before. It put a slight strain on it. It was probably slightly damaged from that coming into training. The session was over an hour long and it was basically the last play of the game and it just went.”
The injury coincided with end of term exams at UCC, 11 in total, where library lock-ins were prioritised over rehab. At the end of May, O’Donnell returned to action, lining out for Éire Óg in the local championship. Disaster. Hamstring tear number two.
“It has been an extremely frustrating summer”, he says. “It was one setback after another. Not to get the chance to play any part for the seniors was very hard to take. The second tear had me pulling my hair out.”
And so the U21 championship represented a last avenue to ensure 2014 was not a complete loss. O’Donnell was sprung from the bench two minutes into extra-time in July’s semi-final clash against Tipperary at Cusack Park. Clare required rescuing and who better to oblige. The management rolled the dice — O’Donnell rewarded them by pulling to the net with his first touch of the game. The subsequent roar could be heard all the way onto the M18.
Shaneomania breathed once more. Selected at full-forward for the decider, he pounced for the opening major of the contest . So far so good...
With Clare in total control, a stray hurley caught the hand of O’Donnell. Taking no chances, joint-managers Donal Moloney and Gerry O’Connor quickly removed their star forward. A young fan seeking an autograph was the first sign O’Donnell had of the trouble that lay ahead as he struggled to grip the pen.
“I was so angry. I couldn’t believe after months of overcoming two injuries that here I was back at square one, back on the sideline. I saw the swelling and just knew. I didn’t get the x-ray until the day after but I initially thought my hurling was done for the year. It just seemed to go from the highest high of winning Munster to the lowest low.
“The management took a punt on me for the semi-final against Antrim. I had only done a half session the Tuesday previous and the Thursday session was my first full session. Given the year I had unless my hand was falling off I wasn’t missing that game. I wanted to play. I wanted to be involved.
“I really owe this management everything. They have taken gamble after gamble on me. It was they who gave me the break in 2010 during my first year minor. They recognise that I always want to be on the pitch.”
And so we arrive at this evening’s decider. Has this sequel a similarly explosive conclusion?
Indeed, tonight brings the curtain down on a five-year journey for this particular bunch of hurlers. Five consecutive Munster titles across minor and U21 level has seen them labelled as the “greatest Clare team of all time”.
Is there a more fitting end than a third consecutive All-Ireland U21 crown?
“It is massive motivation to try and finish by completing the three-in-a-row,” he continues.
“We are forever put on a pedestal and everyone says we are the team to beat. It is difficult to deal with that. We are unbackable favourites every time we go out. We feel the pressure. Wexford will take confidence from the fact they have beaten us already this year. There has been a lot of talk about us but they didn’t listen to the talk about the seniors when they turned us over below in Wexford Park. They didn’t read the papers then and they won’t have been reading them this week either. When you sit down in the cold light of day and think if we lost this it would not be good given how the senior year panned out.”
Who better to keep the show on the road than the very man who kickstarted the party.
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