It’s been a long road – 14 months to be precise – but finally Rory Carr feels ready for a return again.
After dislocating his shoulder three times, Carr underwent surgery in Galway in September. Last Tuesday, almost 14 months to the date, Carr was given the all-clear to resume full contact training again.
On Friday night, he was back at the grind – and it never felt better.
He took his first ball and felt the clatter from Niall Friel.
It was good to be back.
“It was scary enough at the start mind you,” cautions the St Eunan’s man, who is likely to get a competitive slice of cake on Sunday against Dungloe at Rosses Park.
He’d been tipped to make an impact with the Donegal senior team in 2016, but has been left play the waiting game due to his ailments.
In Convoy on Friday, he began one journey and, at last he hopes, put another painful one behind him.
“It’s been a very long road. I was a couple of weeks in the sling and started into rehab right away; I’ve been running since October. I got back into contact on Friday night at county training.
“Niall Friel got the message to hit me as hard as he could. He gave me a few big hits. I found my way into it again, though. It’s been a long time in coming after all that rehab and all that work.
“It feels great; it’s brilliant. There’s no comparison to properly training and only being able to do running.”
He went to Galway, to meet with surgeon Ken Kaar, last Tuesday and the mind was in overdrive.
He says: “The previous week, I got a bang on it. That was the first set-back through the latest rehab state. I blew the injury up in my own head and I was expecting bad news.
“The surgeon said that was all natural. Thank God, he gave me the all-clear.”
He’d been given a call-up by Donegal manager Rory Gallagher when, on December 27, 2015, he dislocated his right shoulder in an Ulster Club minor semi-final against Enniskillen Gaels at St Paul’s in Belfast.
“It was just a tackle you’d do 50 times a game,” he remembers now.
“I was buzzing at the time, too. I’d done about a month of training with the county seniors. I was delighted with how it was going. It was just terrible timing.
“I was trying to put pressure on and push the ball out as the man ran pas. I just felt weird, a very strange pain. I was in agony so quickly. When I was being taken off, I thought that the McKenna Cup was out the window…”
Indeed, Gallagher had been impressed by the versatile Carr, who is as adept and comfortable on the edge of the square as he is at centrefield.
“Rory would definitely have made his debut in the McKenna Cup,” Gallagher said of Carr last year. “He made a great impression since coming in.”
Carr was on the mend and played in a League game against Ardara and in their opening Donegal SFC game against Kilcar, a drawn clash at O’Donnell Park.
The Leaving Certificate exams were looming when it happened again and that familiar, piercing pain shot through his right shoulder.
“We were in Downings one night getting ready for the Championship with Donegal and it was just a completely innocuous challenge with ‘Jigger’ (Darach O’Connor),” Carr says.
“There was nothing to it but, next thing, the shoulder was gone again. I had to shout for Kevin Moran to come and pop it back in.”
Football, at that stage, wasn’t his only worry and for some of his exams in the Leaving Certificate he was positioned away from his schoolmates at St Eunan’s College as he required a scribe to write for him.
He says: “That was a tough time. When I came back first it felt easier to go study. You’d feel good after a tough session. When it happened the second time, I was in wild bad form and it was tough to motivate myself.
“There I was in the Leaving Cert, in my own room and I had to have a scribe. I was only able to write different pieces in different exams. So, I’d speak to them and they’d write.
“That added to the pressure, big time. College places are at stake and you’re thinking, talking to someone, telling them what to write down. It was strange alright.”
Surgery was perhaps inevitable on the troublesome shoulder, but that process was accelerated when, one night in July, he collided with Anthony Thompson.
“I knew it wasn’t 100 per cent coming into that anyway,” he says. “Regardless, I knew I’d need surgery. The ball was kicked in and, just as I went to push Anthony off, it went again.”
In September, he went under the knife in Galway to have the shoulder stabilised and had pins inserted.
He got back to work again and this time is poised to make up for a lost year – with club and county, as he aims to get some game time with the U21s next Wednesday against Tyrone in a crunch Ulster U21 clash.
With nine of Gallagher’s panel gone from last year, several new players have been standing up to the task of late – and Carr wants to join them.
“It’s been hard to watch,” he says. “It’s not easy being injured. You nearly start to be jealous when you can’t go out and play. Rory (Gallagher) has kept faith in me and kept me involved so hopefully I can get in now again and start to play.
“Boys have gone in and have showed that we aren’t in transition. They’ve showed that we’re a team still to be reckoned with.”
