PHYSIO WORK KEPT FENNELLY GOING

YOU can imagine the stick Michael Fennelly shipped from his Kilkenny team mates for the amount of time he was spending on the physio table.

But without it he wouldn’t have been able to train, let alone play, at the highest level.

The All-Ireland-winning skipper was suffering from the debilitating condition Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS).

It’s something he will have to manage for the rest of his life.

Fennelly (36) considers himself “blessed” to have the career he had and survived the “war zone” he says every training session and game was.

When he ruptured his Achilles tendon in the 2016 AllIreland semi-final replay win over Waterford, it was another eye opener he could have done without.

“The tendon wasn’t healthy so they had to put in a new piece of tissue to

strengthen it because it was in poor condition,” he explains.

“That will tell you in itself, the longer you go on the worse your body is going to get, the more serious injuries you are going to get. I had cartilage issues in my knees as well. I always wondered, ‘Am I better off knocking the county to have a longer club career?’

“I knew myself if I keep going through the county, going through these demands, hits and knocks and playing at this intensity, is it going to shorten my club career.

Enough

“I got two years out of my club (after inter-county retirement in 2018) and I would have hoped for more, but two years and two All-Irelands, I was probably very lucky to get that.

“I was happy enough to get it at that stage and cut ties.”

Fennelly leaned on Kilkenny team doctor Tadhg Crowley and physios Robbie Lodge and Kevin Curran.

“I was probably conflicted,” he says. “In my early career I would have been on the bed a lot. I had to get physio.

“There was no way on earth I could get onto the field without physio. It is painful, but there is also huge stiffness there in your muscles.

“Some days if I didn’t get that physio, I wouldn’t have been able to get out on the field. A lot of lads were slagging me about being up on the table, getting physio and not being able to play.

“I couldn’t say to them I have got Ankylosing Spondylitis lads. I’d have been laughed at.

“Even if I said I had rheumatoid arthritis, you’d be laughing at it. That was frustrating for a while.

“I had to realise I needed a lot more care, and they started realising I had a lot of issues going on and needed time.”