MAGUIRE FOCUSED ON ONE TARGET
SITTING at home in the dark, his left eye all banged up, Seanie Maguire tried to put the worst case scenario out of his mind. Tried and failed.
He’s thinking he could lose the sight in his eye. And what then, for his career, the rest of his life? He’s only 25, for Chrissakes.
It didn’t happen, thankfully, but for a worrying wee while last month, Maguire couldn’t see where he was going, in every sense.
The Co. Kilkenny kid bounced into the press room at Abbotstown yesterday with a handshake and a greeting to the press, many of whom he’s known since he was banging in goals for Cork City.
Those strikes earned a move to Preston in the summer of 2017 and when he continued at Deepdale where he left off at Turner’s Cross, senior recognition beckoned.
Could ‘Stealthy Seanie’ be a successor, of sorts, to ‘Reliant Robbie’?
Many thought the Castlecomer man might but it hasn’t come to pass because of a succession of untimely injuries which has left Maguire utterly exasperated at his lack of progress at international level.
‘Sure, you couldn’t make it up,’ he said yesterday.
‘Two years ago, I’m doing well at Preston, got my debut [for Ireland] and if I’m looking two years on then I’d be hoping I’d be probably double-digits capswise and hope to have a couple of goals under my belt.’
‘But things happen, injuries happen, like they have with me.’
After lifting the roof at the Aviva Stadium on his debut in the World Cup against Moldova in October 2017, Maguire has barely been seen in green since.
Initially, it was down to career script akin to something from the ‘Hammer House of Horror’ studio, only the ‘hammer’ was his hamstrings, which appeared to tear at the drop of a feather, it seemed.
After missing chunks of games, he was put on a fitness programme to resolve the hamstring hold-ups, which appear to be working. He warms up daily before anyone else, sees a specialist physio twice a week and is doing yoga.
Maguire was all set to spring from the traps for Preston at the start of the season before a bout of concussion left him seeing stars and then came the ball in the eye which dropped him to the canvass. He takes up the story. ‘I think it was the Thursday before we [Republic of Ireland] were due to meet up on Sunday. I went to take a shot it training, it ricocheted and the ball hit me straight in the eye.
‘I’ve got up and can’t see a thing. Team-mates are calling me and stuff and I can’t see who it is.
‘I walked over to the physio, starting to see a bit clearly in one eye now, and he had a look at my eye. I had a thin red line going straight down my pupil and a bit of a puddle at the bottom.
‘I went straight to the hospital and the blood pressure in that eye was raised four times higher than in the other eye.
‘If he’d left it even a couple of hours, worse could have happened.
‘For about a week I couldn’t see in the left eye and after that I went to see a specialist. She looked at the eye inside and out. She told me that I had to rest in the house in darkness if I could.
‘So you’re sitting there, you’re overthinking, you hear about these freak things that happen to players and you’re thinking, “I could potentially be blind in one eye.” The strange thing is, the night before it actually happened, I was reading about some guy who was in Love Island, he opened a champagne bottle and the cork hit him straight in the eye. And he had to get surgery and lost that eye.
‘So the next day, I’m thinking, “Oh, here we go.”
‘It was just a week before I was seeing properly again and 12 days after I was back training. And two days later we had a game and I was straight back in.’
Back in, with an eye for goal too, as he scored against Brentford and Birmingham in successive Championship games.
As for that first Irish goal, it can’t be far away.
Should it arrive in the upcoming double-header against Georgia and Switzerland, its Euro 2020 currency could be invaluable.
“For about a week I couldn’t see in the eye”