Donnelly back on track after a bad piece of advice
Fitness setback with Fulham stung Donnelly but he is firmly on road to recovery at Fir Park
AS captain of Fulham’s famed FA Youth Cup Final team and a breakthrough Northern Ireland internationalist at 18, Liam Donnelly was a sponge for knowledge and guidance. To this day, however, there is one nugget of advice he wishes he had dodged by miles rather than embraced and heeded.
For it is burned into Donnelly’s memory, creating a scar that may never heal.
‘I do look back and wonder what might have been,’ recalls the Motherwell midfielder. ‘I try to block it out because things could have been a lot different for me.’
It was the summer of 2014 and, if the world wasn’t exactly at his feet, then a fair chunk of the football map appeared well within his compass.
Donnelly had skippered an academy team featuring Moussa Dembele and Patrick Roberts to gatecrash a preserve of the elite, before losing an FA Youth Cup final 7-6 on aggregate to Chelsea.
Michael O’Neill then handed him a senior cap and teenage debut against Chilean stars Alexis Sanchez and Arturo Vidal on the South American tour that was to change the course of Northern Ireland’s fortunes.
He returned home to be fast-tracked to Fulham’s first-team squad to start pre-season under Felix Magath.
So how did Donnelly wind up struggling to get a game for Hartlepool two years later and, upon being rescued by Stephen Robinson 18 months ago, be described by his manager as entering a ‘last-chance saloon’ at only 22?
As a newcomer to the top-team ranks with an uncompromising German taskmaster five years ago, Donnelly was advised against letting the manager down.
So he drove his struggling body into the ground and, ultimately, towards a season out the game.
Donnelly explains: ‘I wouldn’t say I thought everything was easy at that time but I felt I was doing really well. The Youth Cup, the cap, Fulham first team. But I was young and didn’t really have any proper time off that summer. It was two weeks then a very tough German pre-season under Magath.
‘He’s made a name for himself with things like that. I had probably felt an injury, while I was away with Northern Ireland and in pre-season it blew up straight away.
‘I won’t name any names. But a senior member of the medical team told me not to show the manager any weakness. That was the mentality. But I could barely jog around the pitch. Your career can hinge on moments like that.
‘I was out for three months trying to manage it manually — it was pelvis, abdominals — then I ended up needing an operation.
‘So it wasn’t dealt with properly. It was a bad injury and I should have had the operation earlier. I was out for seven months and basically missed that whole season.
‘Look, maybe nothing would have come of it. But we had just got relegated into the Championship and there were a lot of young lads promoted into the first team.
‘Watching all my mates go on to do that was tough. I ended up having another year with Fulham but I didn’t get close to the first team. But for the injury, who knows what might have happened?’
After three months on loan at Crawley Town in League Two, Donnelly was released and dropped all the way back down to the fourth tier.
As he helped take Hartlepool into non-league ranks in 2016/17, the culture shock proved a struggle for a player with Premier League academy pedigree.
‘It was difficult to get my head round being released by Fulham, tough as a young lad,’ Donnelly admits. ‘I had been on loan at Crawley, so I sort of had a bit of an idea what I was going into.
‘It probably wasn’t the level I thought I would be at, though. Into a dressing room of men who are playing for their mortgage, playing for their families.
‘Going from youth football, you are not as confident going into that completely different environment.
‘You have to show your talent as well as getting used to the physicality. And you’d like to think your talent shines through but it’s not as easy as that.
‘You just have to try and drag yourself through.
There are times when you wonder whether you will get to the higher level you thought you were heading to. That is why I came here.’
As Donnelly’s career was going nowhere, Robinson’s travel plans for checking on his former
Northern Ireland youth player also hit the buffers.
On one doomed scouting mission on the train,
Robinson was stranded in Carlisle for six hours.
Nothing lost, ultimately, as Donnelly didn’t even feature for the National League side that day.
‘That’s where he was at one stage,’ asserted Robinson. ‘So he deserves a lot of credit for picking himself up.
‘He lost his way. You lose confidence, you lose belief, you get into habits that don’t facilitate succeeding.
‘His ability was never in doubt, he has incredible talent with both feet. But that desire had to come from him.
‘We create an environment where people have to work hard — there is no choice in the matter. We had to push him and I gave him a few home truths. I was honest with him and he was honest enough to say that I was right.’
Last season, Donnelly was nowhere near the fitness levels demanded by the Motherwell boss and injuries restricted him to 11 appearances. A revelation in this campaign, the 23-year-old has formed a midfield alliance with Liam Polworth and Allan Campbell, driving Motherwell into the third-place mix in the Premiership.
With Donnelly, Motherwell accrue an average of 2.15 points per game. Without, ahead of today’s visit of Rangers, that figure drops to 0.75. The nine-goal touch discovered by a player converted from a career at centre-back is just as much a pleasant shock to Donnelly as anyone else.
He admits: ‘The switch has been incredible and the goals very surprising. This is definitely as good as I’ve felt in my career.’
The injury was bad and I should’ve had the operation a lot earlier