Donnelly weighing up the risks of return to county action
ONE week after the GAA rolled out their roadmap for a return to action, uncertainty remains commonplace among players and management. Already there have been rows put into the public sphere about the scheduling of club fixtures – too many games, not enough games, club campaigns wrapped up early to give the county manager the run of things and so on.
One of the more mind-bending concepts is that adequate preparation time hasn’t been given, despite the fact that the coronavirus pandemic has forced every team into what effectively became a six-month pre-season.
Thankfully, mercifully, the pandemic appears to be passing and with it comes a cautious return to games. The GAA have repeatedly insisted that the matches are on a purely opt-in basis and players are free to participate as they wish.
One man who cannot say with any degree of certainty what he might do is current Fermanagh captain Eoin Donnelly.
The Coa man is a physiotherapist in the Ulster Hospital, Dundonald and as a diabetic, he was shielded from Covid19 patients at the start of the outbreak.
Willing
His condition leaves him in the ‘at risk’ category, which will concern Fermanagh manager Ryan McMenamin as to how often he will be willing to play once county teams return to action from the weekend of October 17.
“On one hand, you want to be playing,” says Donnelly. “It’s difficult whenever I have to go to work, they obviously have diabetics in the ‘at risk’ category so we have to take measures to reduce our chances of getting something.
“Whereas if I go home from work and then decide to go and play football in the evening and weekends, you then throw yourself into a situation where maybe there is less caution being taken. That brings up a few challenges.
“At the moment, you don’t know what it is going to be like in four, five, six weeks’ time. Hopefully things will have gotten better, restrictions will be lifted and it will be fine.
“At the moment, there is a bit of not knowing how much it could be out and about in the community. Players are not going to have been tested, you don’t know about it, so that poses challenges. There is a bit of anxiety about it.”
Adding to the big Coa man’s anxiety is an imminent arrival. He and wife Claire are expecting a baby in just over a fortnight. Because he lives in Belfast, that precludes him from travelling the distance to train with his club.
“That sort of suits me at the minute. I am happier to be training in smaller groups. If I was in a larger group, I would have more trepidation about it. At the minute, there are a lot of unknowns,” he says.
“When you look across the water at soccer and teams are getting tested weekly in the Championship, you see players turning up positive tests that they didn’t know about because they were asymptomatic.
“It’s likely to be the same when you go across the whole island of Ireland and everyone is training with their club. It is still out there, there is still a risk of passing it on, so I am not sure.”
There are plenty of players on the inter-county scene with underlying health issues. If one player with the profile of Donnelly – who led Ulster to victory in the last Interprovincial final played in 2017 – refuses to play, then it could lead to a domino effect.
It would take a person of rare strength of character, but as time passes Donnelly concedes that the trepidation could melt away.
“There are going to be a lot of people around the country who are really rural, don’t see the day-to-day effects and think they are fine and, largely, they are. They will be back at it and that could work out well,” he points out.
“There is maybe more of a risk in the cities, and clubs based around cities may be more at risk and have to keep things on hold.”
That’s the position he finds himself in. Things are changing at work, too.
“Everything in the last few weeks you would notice it getting easier, just because of the footfall, people out and about, they are a bit more confident to go to the hospital, and they are encouraged to go to the hospital as well when they have conditions that maybe they thought was less of a worry than Covid,” he says.
“So they have been staying away but now you can see patients coming back in. Now, it is more to do with how you separate people in the hospital. It can be quite busy in the waiting areas and you have to cater for social distancing, so that makes it a bit of a challenge as numbers start to increase again.”