Michael Fennelly still up to the task and it’s still worth it

Sometimes you find a home, sometimes a home finds you.

When he got the syllabus for this semester in his lecturing job at the Limerick Institute of Technology, Michael Fennelly could have been forgiven for thinking someone was having a little fun with him. There, wedged in alongside the nutrition and the strength and conditioning was a series of classes on injuries.

“No theory, but loads of practical experience,” he laughs.

Ain’t that the truth. The range and number of Fennelly’s injury travails over the past five years or so would have a vet reaching for the locked cabinet.

From ankles to hamstrings to wrists and all compass points of his back, there are days when his body has the feel of a crumpled old taped-up fiver. Still there, still viable but only just.

Fennelly hasn’t played a regulation league match since 2013. Up to and including the league campaign just gone, he’s started just 16 of Kilkenny’s last 45 games in league and championship going back three and a half seasons. He has played 70 minutes just 12 times in those 45 games.

Every year starts the same. Quietly. Gingerly. Hoping not to scare the horses that seem to push and pull in whatever direction takes their fancy within the muscles of his lower back.

This time around, the Kilkenny physios got him back for the league quarter-final against Offaly. He lasted 27 minutes. The reports declared it a hamstring problem but in these matters, pretty much everything can be put down to provincial unrest caused by perpetual uprisings in his back. He didn’t make the semi-final defeat to Clare. He’ll make it at some point of the summer but he doesn’t know when.

Constant issue

“It’s not great to be honest,” he says. “Look, it’s the same every year. It’s just the way it is. You have good days and bad days, good weeks and bad weeks. The back is a constant issue.”

What’s a good day?

“A good day is feeling good. You can do anything and everything. You can lift weights, you can do a training session. That’s it – just being able to go out and do a training session with the rest of them is a good day. When the muscles are working well, when you have no pains, no strains, no imbalance that you feel is going to trigger something, that’s a good day.

“I would know my body quite well at this stage. It’s the same kind of things that pop up the whole time. I could be lifting weights and I would feel a tightness in my back and I would know that even though it isn’t sore yet, that’s the time to stop.

“You’d like to keep going, you’d like to build more muscle and build power but for me to go ahead and do that would probably mean a spasm or a strain in my back. You need to hold back an awful lot in sessions, which is frustrating.”

Fennelly’s career is actually a bit of a miracle, given how much of it he’s missed. This will be his 11th championship as part of the Kilkenny panel, but only in two of them – 2010 and 2011 – has he started every game. And even the opener in 2011 was touch-and-go – they dropped him in against Wexford that year on the back of no training for the previous two months.

Kilkenny have had 50 championship games in Fennelly’s time on the panel but he’s only managed to make the starting line-up for 23 of them. Yet somehow from all that loose change, he has scrimped and saved his way to six All-Irelands, three All Stars and a Hurler of the Year award. It is hardly a coincidence that the All Stars came in 2010, 2011 and 2015, seasons in which he missed just one of 12 games.

“Look, it’s voluntary,” he says. “Nobody is forcing me to play. It’s great that I’m still doing it, in a kind of an artificial way nearly. Injuries will crop up for every player and it’s a matter of just trying to get back as quickly as possible after them. Everyone has something and it’s a matter of just getting on with it and trying to be positive.”

Prehab stuff

This last bit he says with the sort of wry smile that suggests staying positive takes a bit of doing. That he has to force himself sometimes.

“Ah, you do, yeah. It’s frustrating when there’s so much you can’t do. I haven’t trained a whole lot this year at all. I’ve been doing my own rehab and prehab stuff. That’s dragged on longer than we thought. But look, this is every year at this stage . . .”

It wasn’t supposed to be easy but it wasn’t supposed to be this hard either. If nobody is a certainty coming up through the Kilkenny ranks, Fennelly had the look of the exception that proved the rule early on. Pristine bloodlines fed into a minor All-Ireland in 2003, an under-21 All-Ireland as captain in 2006 and a club All-Ireland in which he was the St Patrick’s Day man of the match in 2007.

His first problem was coming of age when he did. The queue was long when he arrived and those already lined up didn’t exactly take kindly to the idea. He made his debut off the bench in the 2006 Leinster final but while that team went on to win four All-Irelands in a row, Fennelly only played two more games in that run. For some of it he was injured, for some of it he was ill. They got on fine without him.

What a schooling though. In later life, he would do a masters in sports performance and coaching before going on to lecture in that area. The more he learns, the more he learns he learned back then.

“You have to be intrinsically motivated. If you’re a manager and you’re trying to motivate your team in every match, that will only work for a certain period of time. The players have to be intrinsically motivated. They have to think, ‘I want to do this. I want to make the difference for this team’.

Highly motivated

“So when I was looking at

Henry Shefflin

and

Tommy Walsh

– these guys are some of the highest intrinsic motivators I’ve ever seen. They would do anything for it. Some of it is genetic. Some of it is just your personality.

“Some people are just highly motivated, others you need to put an arm around the shoulder, some of them you need to kick. It’s just personality. Some people can be quite lazy, that’s just how they are.

“Intrinsically motivated people want to win. Tommy Walsh won a Leinster league medal with Tullaroan last year – probably a fairly minor competition but he was over the moon about it. That’s the way he is. He’s highly motivated to win and to succeed. That’s what I aspire to as well.”

All fine and dandy, of course. But there’s an opportunity cost to everything. Fennelly has his six All-Irelands, yes. But he also has days when he struggles to get out of bed. He has days when he worries about what will become of him in later life.

He got engaged over the winter and yet he wonders if he’ll be able to pick up his kids if and when they come along. Will he have arthritis? Will he be able to function? He knows for certain that all of this will take a toll.

“It will, yeah. Body and years. Without a doubt. And that’s something I’ll have to answer for in a couple of years whenever I do finish up. Maybe a few years down the line, you will wonder. Hopefully it was all worth it.”

Does he resent it, in that case?

“No. You’re in that bubble. You’re going from competition to competition, from county to club and back to county. So you never really get a chance to stop. Sometimes you do need a break from it, mentally and physically. I did get that in November and December last year. I got two months off and I hadn’t had that in a long time.

“I was able to switch off. I was able to get that bit of hunger back and maybe reflect on the last couple of years. I’ve only just turned 31 in February so I’m still young. If I was a few more years down the line, definitely I would be questioning if the body could still take the punishment.

“But yeah, it will be interesting in years to come. I hope to God my body’s not going to be too bad in terms of functioning in everyday life. We’ll see at that stage whether I resent it or not.”

About half an hour after last year’s All-Ireland final, as the stadium emptied in record quick time, the Kilkenny players were still on the field when only a few hundred supporters remained in the stand. It felt routine, nothing special, just marking off a year and moving on.

In his press conference, Brian Cody spoke of the extraordinary lengths Richie Hogan and especially Fennelly had gone to in order to overcome injury and get onto the pitch. Listening in, the contrast between what goes in and what comes out seemed particularly striking just at that moment.

“It’s an awful lot to go through,” he says. “I think people don’t even realise that on days you have off, you’re still thinking about it. You’re still gearing yourself for the next session in terms of what you’re eating, the way you’re sleeping even – a lot of small things like that.

“You think you have a day off but it’s not the case. If it’s sunny out, you’re trying to avoid getting caught in the sun. You’re confined. You can’t plan anything. Going to a wedding or whatever is difficult because weddings are on Fridays or Saturdays and you have training and so forth. A lot of things like that are awkward and planning goes out the window.

“But again, it’s optional. It’s voluntary. And look, what else would you be doing, I suppose? What would you be doing? Playing club, tipping away. But this, setting a goal, playing for Kilkenny, trying to get on the team, trying to win things, that’s your goal in life. If you weren’t playing this, you’d be playing club but you still want something to challenge yourself.”

Still, his All-Irelands are won at this stage. He might well add a couple more but given all he’s had to put himself through, is it worth it?

“It’s definitely worth it. It’s the days in the winter in the wet and cold that you wonder if it’s worth it. Even some of the days, some of the bad days, you’d wonder too what are you driving yourself through to get there. Sometimes you would definitely question it and you would wonder.

“But then when you get to big games – not even big games, just games, any games. You get that buzz and that feeling of being involved again, it’s great. I spent most of the league sitting up in the stand and it was killing to have to do that. It’s hard to watch. You’re so eager to get back in and get back training and to try and sort out whatever you have to sort out to get back on the team.

“And that’s league. Come summer, it’s worse. Very often, you’ll want to turn off the TV or not even go to the game. You would have that feeling of not wanting to put yourself in that position. Summer is way worse because the hype is starting and you have that feeling that everything you’ve worked for all year is starting to build towards this.

“That’s difficult for players to miss out on. It’s difficult if you’ve been dropped off a team, difficult if you’ve retired and difficult if you’re injured. But it’s definitely worth it.”