Irish Daily Star - Inside Sport
PAT SAYS BANNER DAYS ARE OVER
PATRICK O’Connor has no pangs to play for Clare again — his family, work, farming and hurling lives are full enough. But when the ball is thrown in at the Gaelic Grounds tonight, a part of him will wonder. O’Connor (32) ruptured his cruciate knee ligament in a challenge match against Limerick back in May 2021. He says: “I get up in the morning and it (knee) makes a lot of strange noises. By the time I am at the bottom of the stairs it has loosened up a bit. “Ray Moran was my surgeon and as surgeons tend to be, very straight up from day one. He said, ‘You got a bad hand here. I can give you no guarantees that you will ever play again.’ “There was a fracture on the leg. He described it as, ‘Your knee got caught in a lawnmower,’ with all the tears there were to the various ligaments around it. “Quite a bit of damage. People were saying to me, ‘You were unlucky.’ I was very, very lucky for all of my career. I never broke a bone. I never tore a muscle. I never did anything.” O’Connor recalls a feeling of “having the rug pulled from underneath you.” He continues: “It is tough. First of all it was the dreaded cruciate. I will never forget the position in the field. “It just so happened it was right in front of the management. Brian (Lohan) walked out. You hear people talking about the cruciate. The first minute or so is agony. “I was in that minute and Brian just said to me, ‘Did you hear a pop?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He didn’t need to say any more and I didn’t need to hear any more.
Idea
“To be honest I kind of liked the idea of taking on the challenge and having the best crack you could at defeating it and thank God I was able to play all the club Championship last year. “I wouldn’t have been unable to do (Clare) training, but you were only one bad injury away from calling it quits altogether. “My club has been very, very good to me, and I never wanted to go back to them completely crocked. I wanted plenty left in the tank to give to them. “I played all the club Championship last year. I am just delighted to be able to lace up the boots and go out again because I love playing the game. “I’ve been holding a hurley for as long as I can remember and will do so for many more years with the help of God.” O’Connor counts himself fortunate to have avoided broken bones and muscle tears for the vast majority of his career. But a horror thumb injury as a 15-year-old left him with plenty to deal with. “I cut the top off my finger,” he says. “Any bad injury I got after that was generally to do with that. “I don’t know if you are familiar with a machine called a log splitter. I had a run in with my finger and a log splitter. Five or six surgeries later it resembled something like a thumb.”