HENRY SHEFFLIN INTERVIEW: TOM HUMPHRIES talks to Kilkenny's majestic marksman about a year that promised so much until a simple twist of fate intervened to wreak havoc with his aspirations

THE TWIST

HOW DID it look? It looked like a very good year piled onto a mess of good years. In March he won a second All-Ireland club championship. In June, he became the all-time top scorer in championship hurling. In July he scored a goal against Galway, his 23rd in championship hurling. A record having scored at least one goal in championship play every year for 12 years. He’d finish the season with a career total of 23–390 from championship action.

All going well he’d finish the season also with his fifth senior All-Ireland medal on the trot and his fifth Kilkenny championship medal back-to-back. A very good year.

And yet the last clear and pleasing memory of Henry Shefflin in 2010 comes from the 17th minute of the All-Ireland semi-final against Cork. Quintessential Shefflin. Kilkenny had been sniffing about the Cork defence for some time looking for a fissure or a crack. All the time they were rebuffed and we began to wonder if Cork could frustrate Kilkenny through to the second half and make the game anybody’s.

Then Shefflin won possession. Excitement ran like a lick of lightning through the crowd. The king! Cork were disciplined. This wasn’t like a fox landing in a chicken coop. Not yet anyway. They moved to close him. Shefflin took a couple of strides and broke the line. Now there was a sense of clear and present danger. He moved on. They came toward him. Naturally they did. And then he smuggled the ball through to Eddie Brennan who had materialised in space behind the defence.

Goal.

Within minutes he was gone. Undone by his own athleticism. A leap. He’s not a gym rat, never has been. Brian Cody and Mick Dempsey had been gently ribbing him about the lack of power in his jumping. So he became airborne. Got himself some serious hang time. He came down awkwardly but not spectacularly, jamming his left foot onto the hard surface and severing his left cruciate.

“If I caught the ball clean it would have been perfect, I’d have braced myself for a landing and gone. It came out of my hand though and I turned to look at the ball and I can still feel the vibration when the leg went down. I could feel the impact from the sole of my foot coming up the leg. Just the impact. Bang. Popped it.”

Play went on but anything could happen in the first 30 seconds after your cruciate disaffiliates from its mooring. The pain is so exquisite it tends to keep you preoccupied. The Kilkenny doctor Tadhg Crowley and physio Robbie Lodge reached him. They had to calm him first, like a wounded thoroughbred. “Get up, stand up, walk around.” He remembers, “the boys were trying to keep me calm but the head is saying cruciate, it’s the cruciate. I went down the tunnel I was so upset. I said to the doctor, ‘there’s something wrong. I heard something pop’.”

He had been in this place before. The cruciate in the right knee betrayed him three years previously in a one-sided All-Ireland final. Things were different then. People said “well if it was going to go that was a grand time for it to snap”. The “rest” would do him good. His wife Deirdre was expecting their first child at the time so home was a quiet place. This time it would all be different.

THE MIRACLE OF WOUNDED KNEE

He watched the second half of the Cork game begin and just as play settled it was decided that himself and Brian Hogan – who had busted his shoulder – should be express delivered to Wexford for some cryotherapy. One of the stewards in Croke Park, being parked nearby, kindly offered to bring the two players south.

“John was the man’s name. He was very decent. Some journey though. One of us said: ‘Turn on the radio there and we’ll listen to the match’. John said ‘ah, the radio is broken’. It was a big oul car lucky enough. The two of us in our smelly gear. Fed up and hungry. We got word through along the way that the lads had won handy enough. Cheered us up a bit.”

Strangest day of his career. From the white heat of Croke Park to the Wexford ice chamber and home in time to see The Sunday Gameplaying slow motion clips of his left foot hitting the ground.

Usually when a knee ligament snaps it has some impact on the blood vessels around it but this time for some reason his blood vessels had been spared. When he woke on Monday morning and found his knee hadn’t swollen to the size of a football, he experienced his first taste of hope.

He went to Tadhg O’Sullivan, the renowned knee surgeon in Waterford, on the Tuesday. O’Sullivan did a scan and confirmed the damage.

“It was demoralising because you know what is ahead. The first time it happens you don’t know what is ahead. It’s even a bit of novelty. Second time you know there will be no rest. You are going to the gym, trying to walk, to swim to jog. What is ahead? Crutches. Pain. Not being able to work.”

He drove up to meet Deirdre after the diagnosis. Driving on his own through a fog of negative thoughts. Next day his mood wasn’t much better when they went to see Tadhg Crowley.

“Tadhg threw it out as a general idea. Was there anything else that we might try to speed it up. We knew of Ger Hartmann from his work with Ronan O’Gara I suppose so we said it was worth a try. The lads touched base with Ger. I was down there on the Wednesday I think.”

He walked in on crutches to see Hartmann, a man whose positivity fills every room he enters. First thing he told Henry Shefflin was that he had to believe. From that moment Shefflin switched on again.

“I went back on the Thursday determined to drive on. People wonder why. The surgeon had said it was ruptured after all and that was true. There were a few fibres hanging on so I could do a lot of stuff. One legged squats, jump over heights from bad leg to good leg. The muscles around were strong and the three other ligaments were strong. We decided to rely on them and build them.”

Hartmann’s regime involved a lot of tough work. Henry and John Tennyson would drive down together. Once a week they’d do a double session, go down for four hours in the evening, stay overnight and do four hours the next morning. Gruelling and intensive work.

“The first week you are still very sceptical. Ger didn’t say, ‘it’s okay you’ll be playing’. He said the function tests were good and slowly we started believing there was a chance. Maybe there was a miracle going to happen. I can do this. After a couple of weeks I got back training, well a bit of running.”

He was hardly aware of the excitement that was brewing. Rumours insisted he was living in Limerick trying to beat the clock on this one. His sister came in down home one evening and told the family Henry had been running down in UL a short while ago. The miracle of camera phones.

“I didn’t realise it but it went a bit mad. The whole thing was a bit of a disaster in that sense. It happens. You get the news. People know the news. Then you are coming back and the story gallops away. I got back training and there was attention around that.”

Yep. The Wednesday before All- Ireland week is a big night in Kilkenny hurling any time the stripes make a final. The start of the wind down pulls in a good crowd. With Henry making his first steps back onto the training pitch though between 8,000 and 10,000 people turned up as if they were going to have a religious experience. Parking was chaos. Nobody cared.

“It could have ended in tears that night. I’d been doing exercises specific for my knee, which was fine, then you are into contact and doing what you do everyday. I knew I was a bit dodgy that night. At one stage the ball was on the other side of the field and I was running in a straight line trying to make my way in towards goal and I felt it. It almost went. I was just jogging a straight line and I felt it.

“It was a funny feeling. One part of you knows well that your cruciate is gone. Then you are back training though. Wednesday and Saturday. I had got through two sessions fine. I was tired but the week before the All-Ireland I took it handy. I went in for a few pucks with Tommy Walsh the Monday before. Figured if I could handle Tommy I was ready for anything.”

As for the question of playing in the All-Ireland final the decision wasn’t his but his attitude was, why not? He didn’t buy into the idea of keeping him on the bench. If he came on and banjaxed himself again Kilkenny would have wasted a substitution. He did his work and assumed it would be the same old law with Kilkenny. If you are good enough you get picked.

“I was selfish I suppose. I just worried about myself. I put so much focus on getting myself right. In the week of the All-Ireland I was focused on the team. I didn’t think too much about what was going on around the team though. I was focused on doing what I was told to do more than what was going on around us.”

THE FALL

And so it came to pass. The miracle of the busted cruciate. He got to Croke Park on All-Ireland day. He should have been on crutches but instead he was in the beloved stripey jersey. Every eye on him.

What next. Walking on water? Who next? Who would be the first Tipp player to test his balance with a fair but ferocious shoulder? He felt good in the final. He missed the first free because he was nervous but in the puck around he felt good and his touch felt reliable.

“I hit the ball more often in the 11 or 12 minutes I was on than in the previous year’s All-Ireland. I had said it the night before at home that whatever happened I was going to go out and give it 100 per cent. If the knee went it went but I wouldn’t look back and say that I had been minding myself. You can’t play like that. I wasn’t minding myself.”

After about 12 minutes he moved wolfishly onto a ball took it and went to pivot away to the side in one movement. His brain was planning that but his knee wasn’t. The knee went the other way. That was that. He knew straightaway. Instantly. His race was run. He went up to the stand, iced the knee and watched the final unfold.

The way things worked out, his tame and forlorn exit after weeks of drum roll was a disaster, but there are no regrets. “A friend said to me that I could do everything before the final, I could run and jump he said, so imagine sitting up in the Hogan Stand. I’d be regretting it for the rest of my life. It was worth the risk.”

THE BRAID AND BEYOND

This time the blood vessels popped. The knee ballooned. He had to wait a month until the swelling subsided and surgery could be performed. A month on crutches. No work possible.

He began basic movement exercises to fire those muscles which would shut down otherwise. He noticed that just kicking out his leg in a gentle manner caused him unmerciful pain. He didn’t like it. The day of the operation couldn’t come quickly enough.

He woke up afterwards. Woozy. Tadhg O’Sullivan the surgeon standing over him. A big chunk of something in a sample jar. “That’s what your pain was.” The surgeon was holding a chunk of dislodged cartridge. Henry had done the cruciate and dislodged a chunk of cartilage. Not good.

The surgery and its discreet legacy is a miracle in itself. An arthroscopic miracle. Where once a leg would have to have been opened and scarred from mid thigh to mid calf to replace a cruciate, Henry just has one small scar underneath his kneecap and he has a couple of small marks from incisions higher up. The surgery is conducted through the little incisions with the aid of an arthroscope, a tiny camera which relays vision to a TV monitor. Finish your breakfast before you read on.

When the ligament goes it is as they say, gone. So Henry had a hamstring autograft. Crudely put, this involves fetching what is basically a spare hamstring (the semitendinosus tendon) from the thigh and yanking it down and trimming some off before braiding it with a similar harvest from another tendon, the gracilis, to make a four strand segment of 25cm or so long which is then fixed through the heads of the fibia and tibia by means of screws. And hey presto! Hopefully.

This was not a good time to snap a cruciate. Nobody offered that as a comfort. More workless weeks on crutches. With a third child due in early March, Henry and Deirdre literally got snowed in and imprisoned within their house for a week before Christmas. The kids, Sadhbh and Henry, were off colour and by then heard so much about Daddy’s knee and have received so many injunctions against hopping up on it, that they may become arthroscopic surgeons themselves.

This time the struggle would be different. Within Bank of Ireland, Shefflin has recently become National Sales Manager for Toyota Finance and Mercedes Finance. The team he supervises are spread around the country. He’s putting a lot into it. The knee wants a lot of attention too. He offers it the luxury of an automatic car for the hours on the road.

With family and job it is more difficult though, which he doesn’t mind but the head is weary. There is no novelty to being injured. Nothing refreshing. Rehab is slow and lonely.

“The game is a revolving wheel. It goes on without you. The lads are back since after Christmas and were doing weights before. I went in once or twice to keep contact but it is lonely. You aren’t part of it. You miss that company. Then you are at home and can’t even manage to make a cup of tea because of the crutches because how do you carry the cup? It gets tedious.”

The knee inflates unfeasibly after an operation. Mucho pain. So many tablets for the the pain his stomach got upset. After a while the pain seemed bearable so he abandoned the tablets. Three days later he was howling with the pain again. Simple question from the physio. You taking the tablets? Point taken.

He started off with the most basic exercise. After a couple of weeks the scar heals so after 10 days he was back in the pool. Just walking up and down. Then walking up and down the pool with ankle weights on to increase the resistance. Next stage was a stationary bike and some spinning. Minimum resistance. He turned it up a notch one day and paid the price. He does what he is told now. Follows the template. Sets no dates for a return.

Day by day, week by week, he pushes on. He goes out to the garage and lifts a stick, beating a ball against the wall whenever he can. Last time he didn’t do that but now he’s 32 and there won’t be too many more very good years.

It should have been the best of years, a reaffirmation of his majesty within the game. He will be back and who would doubt his raising a green flag or two yet again this summer. He reads of other cruciate victims and measures his progress against theirs. He is sure they do the same.

The glory of Shefflin is his brilliance has always seemed human and rooted in hard work. The rubble of last season and the lonely path back confirms that impression. One true genius who gladly offers up the 90 per cent of perspiration that we may enjoy the tithe of inspiration on summer days.