You lose your identity... it just slips away
Donegal’s Gallagher admits the mental toll of long-term injury has been tough
‘I DIDN’T EVEN LEAVE THE HOUSE FOR THE FIRST TWO WEEKS’
THE sound of a snapped bone and the savage surge of pain it delivered turned out to be the easier part of the injury that sabotaged Eoghan Bán Gallagher’s season.
On the Wednesday night prior to Donegal’s crunch second round clash with Kerry in last July’s Super 8s, Gallagher shattered his right ankle in training and knew instantly his season was over.
Twelve months earlier, a scan had revealed that an arm injury sustained against Roscommon would rule him out the Super 8s final round clash with Tyrone, but he defied medical advice inside two weeks and started the game. This time, though, there was no escaping brutal reality.
‘I knew straight away. I just heard the crack and I knew my season was over,’ he recalls.
Forty-eight hours later, he had gone under a surgeon’s knife and four months on he is still somewhat in the dark as to when he will return, but his aim is to make it back to get some game-time before the end of the Allianz League.
Long-term injuries are so stitched into the narrative of sport that the outside world measures their trauma in terms of the number of weeks, months and games, the unfortunate will miss. The impact on the player can far go beyond that, with Gallagher admitting he struggled to come to terms in the immediate aftermath of sustaining the injury.
‘Physically, you always heal. That is never the tough part. The mental side is the hard part,’ admits the 23-year-old Killybegs man.
‘For the first two weeks I did not even leave the house. I wasn’t physically able to leave the house and you get into a wee rut. You were in the habit of going to training every day, meetpatient ing fellas, you are working and meeting people in that environment.
‘It just takes away the identity of who you are from a work point and from a sports point of view as well, it all just slips away from you all of a sudden.
‘From a personal perspective all your dreams come crashing down at a very bad time of the year.’ As ever, though, the spirit of the group helped ease the pain.
‘A lot of the players came to see me and that was a huge thing for me that they were coming to visit and spending time with me and we were able to chat about things. ‘And when Michael (Murphy) picked me up to take me to Donegal training about two weeks after it happened, you are at least back involved in the group and that is huge to have a close group like that around you to give you support when bad things happen.
‘When I met the physio Cathal Ellis and he started giving me exercises to do, you could feel yourself starting to progress and starting to get back into the swing of things. ‘I would like to be back next week but that is not going to be possible. In all seriousness, the team doctor Kevin Moran and Cathal Ellis have not given me a time frame for a reason.
‘It is just the strength is not there when you are running so I am not even back running yet. ‘I am just gradually building it up. I am getting towards it but I am not there yet.
‘I am getting small wee markers every week or every two weeks and then we review and push it on again. That is the way we are measuring the progress because I would be an impatient and if I was not hitting the deadlines I would be getting kind of frustrated. It is probably because of my character that they are not telling me the dates,’ he admits.
The impact of his loss to Donegal this summer was incalculable. One of the game’s most powerful ballcarrying defenders, Gallagher was unfortunate to miss out on what would have been a first All-Star last year.
And it is easy to imagine that his presence would have added some badly needed energy in that Super 8s final-round defeat to Mayo which ensured that they missed out on qualification for the second time in 12 months.
But even in his absence, the backto-back winning Ulster champions showed just how close they are to the front of football’s chasing pack when drawing in a thrilling contest with Kerry.
‘Watching the All-Ireland final you are disappointed because it is all “would haves, could haves and should haves” but you have to look at the positives. We pushed Kerry and they push Dublin very hard so you have to feel that you are not far away from the top teams in the country.
‘It is up to the rest of us to catch up on them. Fine margins make all the difference when you are playing against the bigger teams and it is the fine margins against Dublin which they are fantastic at. We have to strive to get to those levels.
‘We are not far away and we should take encouragement from that but we still have to push it on.’
However those fine margins will have a new element next season, when the game embraces a fundamental change.
While the advance mark was trialled in last year’s League, it did not gain that much traction tactically particularly among the toptier counties, many of whom had no desire to invest time on a rule that would not be in place for the Championship.
But that changed last month when Special Congress, with little debate, ushered it through as a permanent rule change.
Gallagher believes it is a move that will sabotage a game which had evolved for the better.
‘Personally, I think it is taking the skill of defending out of the game and I think it is going to slow down the game a lot more.
‘And even from the rule perspective, I don’t think they even have defined it. In the AFL it is very clear – when you win the mark wherever you catch the ball that is where the mark is and the defender can stand exactly there whereas in Gaelic football that area is a bit grey.
‘I understand why they are doing it but I felt football had evolved back to an attacking game, it has gone back to a lot more man-to-man defending. Teams have figured out how to break down a zonal defence so it doesn’t tend to work any more.
‘The game had gone a lot more attacking and a lot of people were enjoying the game. The rule change might have been needed a few years ago to encourage attacking play but I think football has gone back to an attack-based game and it is not needed.’
But that aside, he can’t wait for the power to return to his ankle so he can hit the ground running hard next summer where the experience of what he has endured will be put to good use.
‘You have to take the good times with the bad times when you are playing sport and hopefully this will make the good times taste even sweeter if they happen.’