Kerry’s footballer of the year James O’Donoghue has revealed the extent of the shoulder injuries he suffered this year. According to O’Donoghue, speaking in transit on this year’s GAA/GPA All Stars tour to Boston, he was frequently unable to train during Kerry’s championship summer.

“I tweaked it in every game really,” he said. “Just over-extended it and I’d be down like that for a while. I think I subluxated (shoulder joint pops out and back in again) it at one time, went out and came straight back in. It was at me for basically the whole championship.

“I don’t know – I suppose if you tell yourself you’re 100 percent, you probably are. But I didn’t do much training really. I didn’t train at all for a lot of the stages. A good bit of rest – I was nice and fresh.”

Rehabilitation work

Within the past three weeks O’Donoghue has undergone surgery – he delayed the operation until his club Legion had departed the county championship – to secure his shoulder ligaments but the rehabilitation work will keep him out of the Kerry team throughout the league and possibly until nearly the championship.

Although doubly qualified for the All Stars trip as an award winner this year and last, he won’t be able to play and despite being vague about his likely return date, he believes he’ll be back in time for next year’s titles defence.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Hopefully late May or early June all going well. But it’s never that simple.”

He should know. Shoulder and AC joint injuries have bedevilled him even so early in his career – he is 24 – and he has had to learn the ropes in managing the injury and being patient during rehab.

“Em, ACs and dislocations, yeah, basically. I don’t know why. I have a gangly walk and my arms are all over the place, I’d say it just unsettles everything. So, since I was young, I kept dislocating my left one. But that’s sorted now.

Routine enough

“They say it’s routine enough at this stage. I had it done twice on my left, once on this side – I can nearly do it myself at this stage, I’d say. They say six months, and I was up with the surgeon last Monday – he said maybe we’ll take a few weeks off that.”

He is asked had he developed fellow Kerryman Tadhg Kennelly’s trick of putting a dislocated shoulder back himself.

“No. Lethal Weapon style, is it? After a while, your body goes into complete shock after a dislocation. Everything just seizes up. So as soon as you know that you’ve dislocated it, after a couple of times, you kind of relax and it just goes back in itself. It’s just that everything seizes up, that’s the painful bit.

“So once you know you’ve dislocated it, it’s not even sore really.

“You know, the thing about a shoulder injury is it’s a complete mental injury. Because no matter what you do you’re kind of looking around to see if you’re going to get a crack off someone. Once you clear your head, the shoulder injury is fine – it’s not really the most painful one.”

He missed Kerry’s first championship match, against Clare, because of an AC joint injury, which led to a dislocation, and experienced aggravation of the condition throughout the summer, picking up knocks along the way.

Despite that sequence of serious distractions, O’Donoghue had a phenomenal year, ending up with 4-24 and as the championship’s highest scorer from play. He was the default choice for footballer of the year even before the All-Ireland final.

Far from making him tentative, he partly attributes the success of his season to the condition and its mental impact.

“I knew that I was lucky because if I had dislocated it properly again I was out like. It sounds completely cliched and terrible but I was actually playing my last game every game, that kind of way. That’s honestly how I felt.

“Deep down it probably did [drive me on] because it could be your last ball, like. If it comes in funny and you stick your arm out weird it could be game over, like.”

He’ll be able to take it easy in Boston, apart from the tedious routines of rehab, but he said that he would have liked to have taken part in the International Rules Test in Australia last weekend.

“I would yeah. It would have been nice. I was talking to David Moran and he said he had a great experience with it. I was only talking to Paul Earley a couple of times and he said to come up for a trial.

“I would have definitely gone if I had been given a chance and wasn’t injured.”