On the panel since 2005 which is quite some spell.
Yep. He gave it a good spin in fairness for 4 or 5 months
The skirts and kidneys weren’t up to scratch in the digs, youd hardly blame him
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The landlady only knew the first two verses of the boys of fairhill as well. V disappointing
Kev. You say the same thing about every Cork footballer who retires.
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Cork People are very clannish and parochial in general, when you meet Irish abroad you hardly every met Cork people in large numbers who settle abroad, they like stick together down in Cork and want to go home for their spiced beef and beamish
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You’ll be accused of getting “fierce excited” about the caaarrk boys next
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Ah no, @Tassotti has been repeating that ad nauseum forever mate, but he loves Cork and he’s only a made up character,
Your own obsession appears genuine and quite funny.
A serious amount of context needed here
Tactics were retarded.
Keeper was a dope.
Kick out strategy was insane
Players lifted weights 5 times in previous 7 days
Cadogan was actually muck completely. However shields was fighting fires with honour but got overwhelmed.
Well it’s largely true.
Billy Morgan explains the ineptitude in cork football
“If Maurice Fitz and Gooch were born in cork we’d never have seen them”
It’s 100% true
You should see the list of lula’s involved with cork teams from u14 up. It’s outrageous.
One guy, who is actually a nice fella with a massive heart, told them no S&C here i’ll do it all.
He is a cop.
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Revealing piece in the Times. Mental what he was putting himself through
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Any link?
Michael Fennelly heads for the sunset
The former Hurler of the Year climbed every summit as a player before the strain on his body took its toll
Denis Walsh
January 7 2018, 12:01am, The Sunday Times
In one week in mid-summer Michael Fennelly’s inter-county career flashed before his eyes, the story telescoped, like a movie trailer. When Kilkenny hosted Limerick in the qualifiers he started his first game of the year, his fractious body manipulated into compliance. From a standing start he bestrode the match, making 23 plays, more than any other Kilkenny player. It was an apparition of Fennelly from any day in his imperious prime.
Then ten minutes from the end his clubmate Joey Holden collided with him under a dropping ball and his back went into a familiar spasm. Kilkenny’s next championship match was just a week later but for two or three days Fennelly could scarcely move. Over the years the Kilkenny management didn’t subject Fennelly to fitness tests. It was a sort of confidence and supply arrangement.
“If I said I’m right, I’m right and they’d take me at my word,” says Fennelly. “I built up that confidence with them. They’d know by my body language too, how I am. If I was very bad I’d put my hands up.”
Fennelly started against Waterford but he was replaced early in extra-time. He couldn’t keep up with Kevin Moran. In the days that followed Fennelly ran a medical audit on his body. There was bone bruising on his left knee, some cartilage damage and the first flaring of arthritis; there was a hamstring strain too and a welt on his foot that had become infected and needed to be removed immediately.
“All of that after one game alone. My body couldn’t keep up with the intensity. It was breaking down. I was hoping to get a run with the club [later in the summer] but things went from bad to worse. I ended up twisting my knee in the first game. My Achilles wasn’t right either and that needed a lot of work. I was getting so many warning signs and it was so bad that I said I need to start listening to my body and start paying attention. ”
Fennelly’s body was like the internal workings of a clock, at once robust and delicate. His relationship with time, though, was problematic. Fennelly would be missing from the Kilkenny team for weeks and sometimes months and there were seasons when his return date was maddeningly fluid. Long absences became a pattern. What developed was a rolling expectation that Fennelly would be back when Kilkenny needed him most and so often that came true. But that made it seem like his comebacks were inevitable and it wasn’t as simple as that.
While he was playing we never knew the whole story. Fennelly was just 22 years old when he was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in his back. To manage the condition he gets an injection every fortnight but for an inter-county hurler that wasn’t enough to keep the symptoms at arm’s length. His battle on that front was relentless.
“It seems to change every year. The rheumatoid arthritis seems to shift around, it’s at my back, it’s at my neck. I’ve been on the physio table an awful lot. A lot of it would have been just pains and aches and joint problems, neck tightness. I’d be going into training sore. At times you’d feel OK but 90% of the time you’d be on that [physio] table trying to get things loosened out to be some way pain free for training.
“Then you’d have flare-ups and you’d have to manage the training load. You could be going well for a week or two and then you’d get a spasm in the back and have to stop. I was very limited in what I could do in the gym. There were a lot of personal training sessions, a lot of lonely sessions. That was a hard enough time, for years.”
In the summer of 2014 Fennelly’s back went haywire. He went missing from the team for months and occasional bulletins on his wellbeing were economical with the truth.
“I was having problems even walking. When your back comes at you with that severity you actually cannot do anything. You get a fright. Where is this going to stop? You go to specialists and they don’t know what’s going on either. In the space of a month and a half I lost about 10kgs in weight [a stone and a half]. Mentally and physically I was in a really catabolic state. I wasn’t sleeping right either at the time because of it and the stress I’d say. I was after losing buckets of muscle mass. It was completely bizarre. I got medication that seemed to settle the problem and I got back doing a small bit of training — back to a bit of normality.”
Less than a fortnight before the All-Ireland semi-final that summer Fennelly was exposed to contact in Nowlan Park for the first time since early June. Then, against Limerick, they started him. In the All-Star phase of Fennelly’s career that became the norm. In 2012 they parachuted him into an All-Ireland quarter-final after a three-month absence; a year before that he lined out in the first round even though he “hadn’t trained at all.”
Many years ago Brian Cody swore off the practice of picking players who weren’t fully fit or who hadn’t established their readiness beyond all reasonable doubt in the Nowlan Park bullring but he made an exception for Fennelly. From Cody, a compliment such as that was outside his usual vocabulary.
“The players and management were very patient with me over the years, the last seven years in particular. I was a distraction in one sense. Would I be playing? Would I not be playing?”
In the first phase of Fennelly’s career that question carried far less weight and very little mystery. Between 2006 and 2009 he started just three championship matches and completed only one. Competition was fierce. Derek Lyng and James Cha Fitzpatrick was the pre-eminent centre partnership in hurling. Kilkenny had a big cast of understudies who, in order to be stars, only needed the limelight. Fennelly joined the queue at the stage door.
By the winter of 2009/10 his career had reached a crossroads. As Ballyhale’s nominee he had captained Kilkenny to win the 2009 All-Ireland title but he spent most of the summer on the bench, exasperated and unfulfilled. He seriously considered walking away.
In the summer of 2010, though, he made a glorious breakthrough. Fennelly was Hurler of the Year elect going into the All-Ireland final, averaging 21 plays a game, gladiatorial in his bearing. Lar Corbett’s September hat-trick altered the rankings at the last minute but a year later there was no doubt: Fennelly won the award by acclaim.
“This journey wasn’t as smooth as everyone might think. We came in from the ground up. Some players started in the team early enough and then finished early. I would rather have done it my way. I had a few hard years to earn my crust. I did that.”
Fennelly contemplated another season. Kilkenny started a collective gym programme only a couple of weeks after Ballyhale were eliminated from the club championship and he signed up. But then he got married in early December and on his honeymoon in South Africa he had time to reflect.
“I just thought, ‘Am I codding myself?’ ‘Can I get back to those highs again?’ I’m probably trying to climb Mount Everest with a house on my back. The last couple of years I was coming out of games with more injuries because I put my body through that stress and it wasn’t able for it. You go from one extreme to the other. From minding yourself to going into battle. I didn’t want to finish my career on crutches or on a stretcher. I didn’t want to be injured again. I was probably just physically and mentally drained from it.”
In the end, more than enough was plenty. He walked away. In that simple phrase there is a world of goodness.
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I don’t for one second believe that Mick Fennelly uttered those words
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Hes a lecturer in sport science of some form is he not? Wouldn’t be that surprising if he used the jargon.
Good article. Absolute madness crippling yourself like that. Big toll to be paid yet you’d think
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Jaysus. Never knew about the rheumatoid arthritis. The fact that he was in an injection every fortnight would point to a severe enough form of it. Some man to reach the level he did considering that condition
A massive hurler, broke our hearts too often. Some beast.
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Id say 95% of those issues are in his head
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I bet he did
4 years ago this fella was supposed to be finished. Most lads would be considering his condition even back then. Then, big Mick is not like most other fellas. A collusus, a giant.
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