Shane O’Donnell: ‘The stone wall I ran into when trying to interact with the GAA about my concussion was extremely frustrating’

This is not the end. Almost certainly not. Not yet.

Shane O’Donnell made a small bit of a stir a couple of months back by intimating that he might not be around for the 2025 championship and beyond. He was neither definitive nor dogmatic about it but neither was he in any rush to take a candle snuffer to the story when it got lit. The idea that he would move on from Clare hurling at the end of this season was absolutely in play for the first half of the year.

Not so much now. He recently started a new job and though it is entirely remote-working and he isn’t tied to one location, he’s in no hurry to up sticks. He spends six months of the year back living with his parents in Clare and when the intercounty season is done, he’ll go back to the Dublin apartment he shares with his girlfriend. Any more moving than that is on the long(ish) finger for now.

“Yeah, I did mention that I am taking it a year at a time,” he says. “It was probably taken up in the sense that I might decide after this year that that’s it. I had kind of suggested that work could decide things. But now that I have moved jobs and settled into this role, I would say I’m probably playing next year. Without being able to ever say anything for certain.

“It was probably just the chopping and changing of role that made me go, ‘Maybe I might be moving abroad, maybe there might be an opportunity.’ Ultimately, in the next year, year and a half, I do intend moving away with my girlfriend. That is our plan. Next year, I think I will be playing. But then after that, we do want to go to the States, if we can get visas and all those kind of things. That is still the plan.”

Clare will infuse themselves for as long as they can with whatever strain of O’Donnell is available. By any measure, he has put in an extraordinary summer of sustained, eye-catching performances. In six matches so far in the championship, he has been the official Man of the Match against Waterford and Wexford and would have reached the quota on most vote counts against Cork and Tipperary as well.

Over the years, he has shaped and grooved his game around what Clare needed at any particular juncture. The early mop-topped days when he fed himself on goals gave way over time to a more withdrawn role out around the half forward line. For the past two seasons, he’s been back in closer to goal, Clare’s own Ellis Island processing whatever ball they can send his way.

Along the way, O’Donnell has made himself into arguably the best player in the game when it comes to securing possession in tight spaces. The scientist in him would bristle at such a sweeping statement, since it comes unbacked by any kind of empirical evidence. But it’s a you-know-it-when-you-see-it kind of thing and after umpteen seasons of watching him wriggle out of full-on games of Twister with the ball in his hand, it feels worth asking him his secret.

“I don’t have a good answer,” he says. Before, inevitably, going on to give a good answer. “When someone goes to all the effort of hitting the ball into you, you kind of have to win it or you’re not going to be starting the next day. So there is an element of selective pressure on your evolution as a full forward. I’d also say that I spent a lot of time, realistically, underweight for the position. So securing the ball was honestly 95 per cent of my game.

“Your odds of making sure you secure the ball, whether it’s coming low or high, are definitely governed by how much space you’ve left yourself in front of you. If you’ve run into your space and the ball is coming very 50/50, well then it’s not 50/50 in that case. It’s favouring the back. Then you’re in trouble and you’re going to take something serious to actually control it.

“But if you can keep at 80/90 per cent pace when you’re running into a ball, then the back can only do so much. They can pull hard but your right hand will be dealing with that and you can focus on controlling the ball. So I think it is about maintaining the space you’re trying to run into.

“Obviously it’s easier said than done. It depends hugely on the lads out the pitch. And that intuition – you know when they’re going to hit the ball. If you run early and they touch it off the hurley then everything is kind of f**ked. I find the success for me controlling the ball comes down to how fast I can continue to run into it so that the back is still a metre behind me when I have to control it.”

It’s answers like these that make O’Donnell such a singular kind of figure in the GAA world. For one thing, most modern hurlers and footballers would run a mile from the idea of an extensive interview ahead of an All-Ireland semi-final – or at least at one they weren’t getting paid for.

For another, intercounty players often panic when you ask big dumb questions about why they’re any good at the thing they’re any good at. Regimented humility – whether genuine or otherwise – means the last thing the best players in the country will ever admit to is having the sort of expertise that sets them apart from the pack.

O’Donnell’s mind doesn’t work like that. He is, famously, a Harvard alumnus, a Fulbright scholar with a PhD in microbiology. He works for a company that helps run clinical trials and his job pulls the door closed on the hurling side of his life as soon as he turns on his computer. The company is based in London and Cambridge and his boss is more of a rowing man. Shane O’Donnell the Clare hurler is of no great use to them. He likes that.

“I don’t think it [hurling] is all consuming. I love playing for Clare but I’m glad that I have a job that takes a lot of attention – in the sense of I really do have to focus on it for the eight or nine hours a day that I’m doing it. I can’t minimise the screen on a Zoom call to do my video analysis. So that actually helps a lot.

“After the Munster final, it was great to jump back into work and focus on something that wasn’t hurling. I was able to concentrate on work things and use that as a distraction. I’m glad that I have that other focus outside of hurling. I think it helps balance.”

That balance allows him to create a comfortable kind of separation from the GAA vortex when he wishes to. His experiences in the wake of his well-documented concussion issues in 2021 only confirmed his sense of independence.

Late last year, he brought a motion to the GPA’s annual conference, pushing for improved compensation for players who have to miss work because of injuries sustained in the course of GAA activities. It ended up with a change in official policy but the whole experience grated on him.

“That was eye-opening, basically,” O’Donnell says. “The stone wall I ran into when trying to interact with the GAA on that was extremely frustrating. It’s probably opened my eyes to some of the things the GAA do that I just disagree with. I just think they’re doing it wrong, with the wrong intentions sometimes.

“And maybe that’s unfair. I don’t want to just go on a tirade here. But over the last couple of years, I’ve realised how important the GPA are. And I’ve realised the challenges they face in trying to push through the things that you would just expect to be part of the process already and how the GAA seem to fight them tooth and nail.

“I probably throw myself into it a small bit more now than I would have before all the concussion stuff. The concussion was such a large part of my life actually. And then to be met with the apathy that I was met with by the GAA after it, I was pretty stunned by it. And look, whatever, I brought the motion on it and there’s a positive outcome eventually so I do commend them for engaging in that.

“But since then I’ve been less willing to be like, ‘Aw, you know, it’s okay …’ Or even to just go, ‘Someone else will deal with that.’ I am much more of the mind that maybe I should be pushing for these things now. Maybe I should be getting involved with the GPA rather than just letting them see what they can do with it.”

Onwards. These past few seasons under Brian Lohan have been the most he’s enjoyed being a Clare hurler. The phoney Beatlemania of everything that happened after 2013 could have soured him on intercounty hurling but he kept plugging away and has found himself part of a competitive group who don’t feel at all coy about eyeing the big prize. Eight of the team that will start against Kilkenny are 28 or above – it’s no surprise to hear that Lohan frequently turns matters over to them.

“Brian has ushered in an era of a certain amount of responsibility being put on us, which we’ve all enjoyed a huge amount. I feel like we’ve grown and matured as a panel because of that. He has put the faith in us and we feel it that way. Not just the older lads but the younger ones as well.

“Obviously the management make the decision. But taking information from us and having open conversations and incorporating that into the decision they make – that’s essentially all you can ask as a player.”

They head to Croke Park this weekend knowing that very few shades of grey are on offer. Clare either do the thing or they don’t. Losing to Kilkenny three years in a row won’t be examined with very much nuance out in the world. Whatever the outcome, they’re ready.

“I know two years ago, we met Wexford in the quarter-final and had what was actually a really good game, a really bruising game. It took until the last five minutes to wear them down and get through them. That was great and everybody was in great form and the Clare crowd were psyched after it.

“But it took a lot out of us, on top of a Munster final that took a lot out of us. And then we came into a Kilkenny game, probably psychologically thinking we were in a perfect place. Maybe physically, we were. But it’s easy to look back and see that we weren’t. We prefer the way we have it this year.”

In an odd kind of way, the Kilkenny glass ceiling has served as a handy hype-killer. Everyone in Clare has learned one-game-at-a-time the hard way. Or pretty much everyone.

“After the Munster final, the Clare supporters who were being positive were all saying, ‘Look, we’ll have an opportunity to see Limerick again.’ So that’s the part where having met Kilkenny over the past number of years, you’re instantly able to brush off that kind of talk. With that experience, you were certainly not entertaining any comments about meeting Limerick again down the line.

“But from just the basic act of going out and playing Kilkenny on the day, I don’t know if the last two years make that much difference. You do get familiar with teams and how they want to play after playing them a few times. So there’s a small bit of that. But we’ll certainly be approaching it as a new game and not really reading into the last couple of years.”

Taking it as he finds it, his own man to the end

Whenever and however that comes.