The Mayo statement ran to just over 50 words and the vagueness of it effectively told me everything that I needed to know.
I’m not aware of the full extent of Cillian O’Connor’s Achilles tendon injury but I’d be surprised if we see him in a Mayo jersey again this year.
I’d have much preferred to read that Cillian had suffered something like a calf strain that would rule him out for maybe three or four weeks and that he’d be back for a potential Connacht final, which will probably be the case for his brother, Diarmuid.
But, knowing James Horan, when that level of detail wasn’t forthcoming, it suggests that it’s possibly a season-ending injury as he goes under the knife this week.
Non-contact injuries are always the most worrying, particularly when I saw the pain that Cillian was clearly in on Sunday.
He’s one of these rare types who masks his pain very well. I’ve often seen him walk off stony-faced only to learn later on that he was in quite an amount of bother. So when even he couldn’t conceal his distress, I feared the worst.
He’s been through the ringer with injuries before, particularly with his shoulder and knee, but he always managed to get himself right for the Championship.
Last Sunday’s game against Clare was his 100th for the county and, unusually, 60 of them have been in the Championship, with the remainder in the League.
He’s spent a few winters and springs rehabilitating injuries but his record of starting every Championship game Mayo have played at Croke Park since 2011, along with Aidan O’Shea, looks set to fall this year, should they make it back there.
He’s been a hugely inspirational figure to the team over the past decade and while I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Mayo’s All-Ireland chances are gone for this year, they’ve certainly been seriously damaged.
It’s hardly a coincidence that Mayo moved out of the pack to become All-Ireland contenders once he broke into the senior team. He’s surpassed Colm Cooper as the all-time leading Championship scorer and accounted for a whopping 5-40 of the 8-80 that Mayo scored in the run to last year’s All-Ireland final.
I spoke to him last October and, after shaking off the problems with his knee, he told me that he had never felt in better shape physically. He ended up with another All Star and a Footballer of the Year nomination.
He scored 0-9 out of Mayo’s 0-15 in the final, won two of the frees that he converted, slotted two marks and another couple from play. So much goes through him and he sets the tone for the high press that Mayo like to effect. He leads and sets the tone for that forward line.
After the spate of retirements at the turn of the year, it was vital that Cillian, Aidan and Lee Keegan stayed fit.
Paul Towey or Darren Coen could offset his loss from a free-taking point of view but that’s only scratching the surface.
It is an opportunity for players like that to step forward, however, and for Tommy Conroy and Ryan O’Donoghue to become leaders in their own right.
This will hurt Cillian psychologically as much as anything else but he’s very stoic in his thinking. He’s a huge competitor and, once he has the procedure done, he’ll get to work and there’ll be noticeable improvements but, like all injuries of this nature, you’ll hit a plateau at some stage and that’s when the frustration kicks in.
I experienced that with my cruciate in 2012 and you need a good network of family, friends and teammates around you to get through it. I had that then and Cillian will have it now.
