GAELIC GAMES:HENRY SHEFFLIN is fine. The knee has not buckled in club hurling nor with packs of All Star defenders hunting him around Nowlan Park the past few weeks.
Then last Saturday night he put it to the real test. Championship. He clipped a single point from play, hardly invigorating stuff, but 0-8 from placed balls had the Wexford yelps of the first half reduced to murmurs in the second.
Not that this was the return of the king. Not yet. But the knee is twisting and bending again.
“I wanted to wake up the following morning feeling okay. I was happy enough, a small bit sore, but the age thing could be coming into it as well,” Shefflin told a media cabal up in Dublin yesterday at, ironically enough, the Lucozade Sport injury prevention and recovery information day.
With two bad cruciate injuries, three if we include last September’s breakdown, in three years and the body now requiring constant minding as he closes in on his 33rd birthday, the man would know more about the latter.
Shefflin’s knees are a close second to Paul McGrath’s as the most talked about joints in Irish sport. Even for someone of his achievements, there must have been a temptation to ease into it.
“I suppose you’d say to yourself you’re ready to go a 100 per cent but you are a small bit tentative, there’s no doubt about it.
“But no, I was happy enough; I am happy enough with how I’m moving more than anything else. I suppose the hurling aspect and stuff like that will probably – hopefully – come as I get more match action under my belt. But it’s once you feel you’re moving freely, and I am doing that.”
We learn from this interview. Wexford Park was Shefflin’s 53rd consecutive championship appearance. He has played every game for Kilkenny since arriving on the scene in 1999. That includes two winters laid low with cruciate rehabilitation. He automatically touches his shoulder, an old war wound, and realises it was the under-21 championship he missed back in 2001, but no senior games.
He also reveals that the recovery rate for a professional soccer player in England is six months, but the surgeons have started holding back amateur GAA men as it is not possible for them to put in the same amount of recovery work.
“They’ve pulled that back now because a lot of GAA players were pushing for that and they found that they were rupturing their cruciate.”
More questions about the knee. Did he ever think he was finished?
“In the dark days after it happened and you’re getting the surgery and stuff like that, you have negative days. Some days you wake up in good form and other days you’re not, and I suppose on those days you’re wondering whether you will get back to the level where you want to get back to playing intercounty hurling.
“But that’s very early on. Once you kind of get over it the surgeon is testing your knees and saying ‘look, it’s going to be fine’ or whatever, then you just have to drive on.”
And the All-Ireland final – would you do that all again?
“Definitely so, no doubt about it. It was an opportunity to play, first of all. I was able to run, able to jog and twist and turn, obviously not to the level I would have liked to as it turns out.
“I started well enough and I did well enough in training, so I was happy. Just whatever movement I made it wasn’t strong enough. But if I didn’t play I’d always be wondering ‘what-if’. I don’t have that.”
