Injury gives O’Sullivan welcome wake up call
CIAN O’SULLIVAN has admitted that his current injury troubles have given him ‘a reality check’ in terms of his ambitions with the Dublin footballers. The five-time All-Ireland winner has been sidelined since dislocating his shoulder in the League win over Kerry in March, and could return for the Leinster final on June 24 providing the All-Ireland champions avoid a shock defeat to Longford this weekend. And O’Sullivan, 30, has revealed that being forced to watch on from the sidelines has given him a fresh appreciation for his role. ‘I wouldn’t say renew the appetite, but it just makes you realise how fortunate you are really,’ he said. ‘As a positive, not that you need it too often but it is a good reality check to remind you how much it means to you and how privileged you are to be out there playing. It’s very sobering to be sitting there at training sessions and seeing the other lads going hell for leather and you can’t take part. ‘In terms of if you ever needed an extra ounce or two of drive or hunger, it’s good from that respect. Not that you should be needing that anyway.’ Dublin are red-hot favourites to win an eighth successive Leinster Championship title this summer, although the province has already provided plenty of early season shocks with Longford and Carlow dumping out Meath and Kildare respectively. It is a trend that O’Sullivan isn’t paying too much attention to, repeating the mantra that Jim Gavin’s squad are only focused on themselves rather than the number of trophies that the Dublin juggernaut continues to stack up. ‘When you start listening to all that stuff, that’s when complacency sets in and you start thinking about things, about whatever amount of Leinsters and All-Irelands [that you have won]. ‘Last year when we won the All-Ireland final, genuinely there wasn’t many guys who would have been thinking at the end, “Yes, we’ve done the three in a row”. That wasn’t what we were focusing on, or aiming for. ‘It’s a credit to how the team has been prepared by the management that they can get us into that state of mind, into that focus. ‘That’s the way we’ve approached everything for the last six years, we’re not going to change this year.’