Monday morning and Shane O’Donnell is sitting in the restaurant of the InterContinental hotel, Clare’s All-Ireland final base. There’s a decent crowd of Clare fans still around and the mood is giddy but the Ennis man is only interrupted once in a 25-minute chat.
It’s a brief interruption too, an older Clare fan politely informing O’Donnell that ‘there is a case to be made that you were Man of the Match yesterday, you brought them back into it in the first-half’.
O’Donnell, careful not to undermine Tony Kelly, who won the award, smiles but shrugs it off. “I think that would be incredibly unfair,” he replied.
The exchange drew O’Donnell’s mind back to a similar interview he conducted 11 years ago in the Clyde Court Hotel, the morning after Clare’s 2013 All-Ireland success. He was a rock star back then, fresh off 3-3 in the final replay defeat of Cork and still a teenager.
“It was a similar interview like this one, in a foyer in the hotel, and it turned into a mass mob, just by having a conversation standing somewhere for a few minutes,” recalled O’Donnell. “It was just like that, anywhere you went. It wasn’t particularly enjoyable so I’m really looking forward to enjoying the next few days now.”
It didn’t help at the time that Louis Walsh was talking about O’Donnell as ideal boy band material on national TV. He could have embraced it all and milked the stardom but instead kept a low profile, focused on completing a PhD in microbiology and redoubled his efforts as a hurler.
“It was just not enjoyable to think about going that route,” said O’Donnell of the celebrity circuit. “It wasn’t enjoyable to go out and be drinking and be pulled and dragged all over the place. Yeah, I guess it could have gone that way but in reality it was never going to. It was never really an option, nor did I ever entertain it.”
O’Donnell, unsurprisingly, has no regrets. And also no plans to pack away his hurley having talked earlier in the year of possibly relocating to the US in 2025.
“Basically, Niamh’s Dad is American and she’d love to go back and live there for a bit and I’d love to live there for a bit,” he said, referencing his girlfriend.
O’Donnell leaned on his partner heavily last week and in the build up to Sunday’s final defeat of Cork. He suffered a mild hamstring tear in training just last Tuesday and initially was not sure if he would feature in the final at all.
“On Tuesday evening I thought I was 100 per cent gone,” he explained. “I went and got an MRI scan on Wednesday at lunch and then found out an hour later it was a 1A and that I had a 50 per cent chance of playing, there or thereabouts, depending on how it healed. It was just, ah my God, the emotion of thinking I was gone to then having a chance and still not knowing, and waking up every morning and being like . . . terrible, just extremely [difficult].”
The dodgy right hamstring got him through 80 minutes or so until his other leg, “compensating for how much I was holding the left leg” cramped up and gave in. He took a knock on the shoulder too.
All small fry, of course, compared to the concussion injury he suffered just over three years ago. He’s spoken extensively about that and how he thought he mightn’t play again. Less so about the mental impact of the gruelling period.
“I was afraid of it, there’s no other way to describe it, I was afraid of it happening again because it was such a hell of a summer,” he said. “My girlfriend is a psychologist and she just said that exposure is how you get through all these things, you have to expose yourself to the thing that you’re afraid of.
“Basically that was the reason I went back hurling, she just said that if you decide not to go back, this is going to be lingering over you and you’re not going to be able to clear it.”
From there to here, the journey back has been a remarkable one. And he’ll go again with Clare in 2025.
“Definitely,” he nodded. “We just kind of said that going to America next year would be pretty tight so we are probably going to put it to the year after. It just works out for what we are planning.”
