Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
John battling b from injury.. an the tender ag 41 he still reck he’ll be a good ca
JOHN CONNOLLY could easily have called it a day.
At 41 years of age, with two decades of distinguished football behind him, no one would have blamed the popular Dubliner had he decided that a ruptured Achilles tendon, the worst injury of his playing days, was his body’s way of telling him to give up.
The result of an innocuous training ground incident when it “popped” without so much as a team-mate or football anywhere near him, the prognosis of a solitary and soul-destroying nine months on the sidelines was, from the outside looking in anyway, surely the sad but inevitable curtain call for a colourful and successful career.
And the veteran goalkeeper, known best for his eight years between the sticks at Cliftonville, admits the thought did fleetingly cross his mind.
On reflection, however, he resolved that it would have been an ill-fitting and inappropriate way to end his time in the sport he loves, determined as he is to make that call on his own terms rather than be forced out.
And in any case, Connolly is made of sterner stuff.
The man who once played through the pain barrier with a fractured kneecap is no quitter, so here he is, on the comeback trail again and talking to Match On Tuesday with the infectious enthusiasm of an academy cub just starting out in the game. Retirement? Well that can wait. “Whenever it first happened, the first week or two, it did cross my mind. I was thinking, do you know what, maybe I’ll just leave it at that,” said the Portadown keeper, out since last November.
“But I spoke to a few people, obviously the manager at the time was Niall Currie, and I spoke to him, and he was saying don’t be thinking that way.
“And the good thing is once I am fit, I’m in good condition so I’ve got a plan in terms of what I’m going to do in terms of pre-season and I’ve got a timescale and I want to play on for another couple of years, touch wood.”
Last week, Connolly reached another milestone in his recovery, dispatching a tweet which showed him back down at
Shamrock Park for some ball work with the gloves on.
Though it is still much too early to put any strain on his injured foot, he says just feeling a part of it again was a huge relief after a few months working on his own.
“With the injury, I was probably better getting a break than what I ended up with,” said Connolly.
“So my plan at the minute is to be back for pre-season, that’s the guidelines I’ve been given by the physio anyway.
“And at the minute, I’m ahead of schedule. I was down at the club last week which was great because most of the stuff I have been doing has been on my own, so it was great to get down to the club and to do a little bit with the ball.
“The worst thing for me is I’ve been doing most of my stuff in the house. I haven’t been able to get to the gym
because I had the cast on and then the big boot, that was for 12-and-a-half weeks so whatever I had to do, I had to do it in the house.”
In the interim, the landscape has changed hugely at his club. Currie is no longer there, of course, after Matthew Tipton was brought in to galvanise a club weighed down by the huge weight of expectation to get out of the Championship straight away.
And Connolly is long enough in the tooth to know a new manager will have new ideas, and after chatting with Tipton last week he admits he could be on the move again once as his one-year deal draws to a close.
“It is a strange situation, with being injured and then in between the manager getting sacked but the plan is to be fit for pre-season and wherever that is, we’ll wait and see then,” he said.
Looking back over his career, despite more than 600 senior appearances at clubs including Newry, Derry City, Finn Harps, Larne and Glenavon, Connolly knows his eight years at Cliftonville under Eddie Patterson is what continues to define him in the eyes of Irish League fans.
He was brought to the club at a time when the Reds were finally beginning to emerge from the shadows of their Belfast rivals, yet for all their promise, including famous European wins against FC Dinaberg and HNK Cibalia, they never quite managed to dislodge David Jeffrey’s all-conquering Linfield.
And though Connolly, right, would eventually miss out on the glory days of the Breslin era, moving on to Glenavon in 2012, he reckons his time at Solitude was the best days of his career.
“I suppose people know me mostly from being there,” said Connolly.
“I was there a long time and played a lot of games so let’s not beat around the bush, it’s a club that I hold fondly. It was great to be there. I loved every minute of it, winning trophies there and playing in Europe, it was a great time.
“And at that time, there was a really good atmosphere around the place, a great dressing room, great lads in the dressing room, and with regards to Eddie we all knew what Eddie was like, what he expected out of us and the way he was.
“And to be fair, he got the best out of me.
“He got me to perform and we came close a couple of times to winning the league,