Championship comes too soon for Tadhg de Búrca to help Waterford cause

The centre-back won’t be in and around the Waterford camp at training or on matchdays as he takes a different approach to his second cruciate rehab

Tadhg de Búrca with Waterford manager Liam Cahill, centre, as he leaves the pitch injured during the 2020 All-Ireland SHC Final. Photo by Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile

“I haven’t watched it back. Couldn’t really face it yet,” says Tadhg de Búrca, his answer indicating an underbelly of pain that still lingers almost five months on.

The Waterford centre-back delivered the above response when asked to recall the cruciate ligament tear that forced him out of last December’s All-Ireland hurling final after only 20 minutes of action.

The game and season-ending injury happened so innocuously as to be unexplainable. Nobody has been able to provide him with a root cause.

The final was 19-and-a-half minutes old when Kyle Hayes planted a long delivery down on top of Limerick full-forward Seamus Flanagan and Waterford corner-back Shane McNulty. De Búrca raced back to assist his teammate but crumpled to the ground as he went to bend down and roll the sliotar onto his hurley.

In a most telling moment of agony, he immediately grabbed his right knee upon hitting the deck.

It was his second cruciate ligament tear on the same knee in the space of 15 months.

“I knew straight away. I heard the pop. It was gone totally weak,” he says.

“All I was doing was running back the way. The knee buckled under me. I don’t know why it happened. Just one of those freak kinds of injuries.

I had the rehab done from the previous cruciate injury, the knee definitely wasn’t weak. It wasn’t that. The structure of the Championship, maybe that didn’t help, the fact I was playing week in, week out. Maybe that had something to do with it. I am not sure.”

The 26-year-old spent the remainder of the final sitting in the Hogan Stand, a wounded spectator as Waterford’s 61-year wait for Liam MacCarthy glory stretched into a 62nd year.

“You obviously wouldn’t be in a great place, but I was still hoping we’d win the match. If you won the All-Ireland final, you definitely wouldn’t really be sad after the match, you’d have an All-Ireland in the back pocket. The fact the result went the way it went, definitely a very bad day.

“Not great on the nerves when you can’t really do anything about the result or the play itself. The fact that Limerick were kind of a lot more dominant, definitely wasn’t easy watching it at all.”

Waterford return to competitive action this weekend, but you won’t find the injured de Búrca at Páirc Uí Chaoimh minding hurleys, carrying water, or among the extended panel members sitting in the South Stand.

What he found particularly tough during his first ACL rehab was looking out from the gym room in Carriganore at his teammates playing hurling on the pitches below. And so for this second rehab journey, he has decided to put distance between himself and the Waterford panel. So while he’ll be in constant contact with the team physios and medical personnel, de Búrca won’t be in and around the Waterford camp at training or on matchdays.

“It is better for the rehab itself because I am working in Dublin (he teaches Irish and Geography at St MacDara’s Community College in Templeogue) and the driving down to Waterford wouldn’t help the knee, you’d be stiff coming out of the car. It is just easier to get the rehab done up here, to be honest.

“All my friends are inside the panel. It is nice to be in and around there, but at the same time, you don’t want to be a bit of an intruder. I’ll stick with my rehab and see how that goes.”

As for his return inside the whitewash, the target is September, meaning we won’t see last year’s All-Star centre-back in a Waterford shirt in 2021.

I am aiming for September, to be fully back playing. Whether that is ambitious of me now or not, I will have to ask my physio.

“Before the announcement of the 2021 season was made, I was a bit hopeful that maybe they might play the inter-county at the end of the year, and I might get back for that, but that has been ruled out. Mixed emotions when that came out. Obviously, you don’t want to miss out on the inter-county season, you don’t get many of them.

“But there is a positive to it, as well. It definitely reinforced in my mind that I had to get back for the club, get back for September or October, and playing as best as I can with my club. It relieved a bit of pressure, I suppose.”

Having gone under the knife at the beginning of January, he’s satisfied with his progress to date. Hopping on one knee for 30 seconds was the latest milestone hit and the plan is to start back running in the next fortnight.

The work is as much a mental challenge as it is physical.

“You’re aiming to rehab every day and obviously you can kinda get sick of that. You train yourself and tell yourself you have to do it just to get the knee back right and hopefully get back to playing as well as you were before you did the cruciate.

“Some days you feel on top of the world after achieving another milestone and then some days the knee might be sore and you think you are after regressing, so a lot of ups and downs, but I feel like I am on track.

“At the moment, I am only thinking about getting back jogging. I am not thinking about getting back playing hurling with the lads yet. I am taking it day by day, getting the leg strong, getting back running and taking it from there.”