Horror head injury was never going to stop me: McCluskey

UNLESS Ryan McCluskey is showing you and urging you to look closely, you won’t see it. But above his two ears, a scar gouges through his hair, heading up to the crown of his head. His left eyebrow is ever so slightly raised to accommodate the steel plate that resides in his forehead.

It was just a routine training match in May 2012, the pace getting faster as the Ulster Championship approached, when he collided with a Fermanagh team-mate. His frontal sinus plate was shattered.

The surgeons could not enter the area through his eyebrow, with bone and matter floating in the area. So they cut the frontal bone of his skull, opened his head like it was on a hinge and inserted the plate.

And despite all of that, he still wanted a piece of the 2012 Championship.

“I had a mad notion on my birthday. It was June 2 and we were playing Cavan on June 3,” he recalled.

“The qualifiers were two weeks later. I was back on the pitch on the Tuesday night but, with the multiple medications I was on, I had a mad view I was going to throw on a Petr Cech head cap to play. It was never going to happen as I had 50plus staples holding my head together. It would have been bananas.”

He was 32 then. His mother Noreen and other family members urged him to give up Gaelic football — “She wanted me to knock it on the head — no pun intended!” he laughed.

And here he is now in 2018 — 36 years young, 37 by the time the Championship rolls round again. The last man standing, the longest-serving inter-county footballer and the very last to have been named on a county panel in the last century.

And not from a county that has challenged year in and year out, but from the peaceful backwater of Fermanagh, operating in Division Three and away to Westmeath this weekend.Ina world of his contemporaries saying they just can’t take the inter-county life anymore, he is a remarkable specimen. Looking at him, with his body fat ratio of under 12%, recently married to Donna and his daughter Eva Rose at home, the only obvious question to ask is… why?

“I love it. I love the sport. I have nearly become institutionalised by the whole thing. But I enjoy the routine. I enjoy the fact that you are never going to get another platform in an amateur level to be the best physically, mentally and medically,” he said.

“I suppose I wasn’t good enough to get that chance to go away at soccer (he spent years playing in the Irish League for Cliftonville, Dungannon Swifts and others), but to get that opportunity to play at this level is brilliant. I love all that.

“It has helped me build a bit of a profile for work, in terms of lifestyle off the pitch as well. It would be something I would find hard to take myself away from.”

He’s sitting in the brand new premises of Focus Recovery, his business venture in Enniskillen that launched this week, with ice baths, recovery trousers and foam rollers everywhere.

People have been good to him. MFC Sports have given him uniforms for the staff. County team-mates and players from another former soccer club, Ballinamallard United, have been in to freshen up their legs after heavy sessions.

But he is good with people, too. It is hard to imagine any player who has given more to the cause of their county but, given his origins, a certain symmetry applies.

Growing up in Carnmore Rise in the middle of the Cornagrade estate, he only had to look out his window to see Brewster Park underneath him, and wonder if sisters Caroline, Theresa, Jackie or Marion were going to be playing camogie, or his big brother Stevie would be engaged in football or hurling down below that day.