Egan hopes Offaly injury pain will lead to long-term gain

By John Harrinton

Offaly footballer Cormac Egan hopes that short term pain can lead to long term gain for the Faithful County.

A long list of injuries has contributed to a very tough Allianz Football League campaign that has seen them lose four matches in a row, with the most recent a chastening 23-point defeat to Derry last weekend.

Joint-managers Declan Kelly and Mickey Harte have had no option but to throw some young players in at the deep end, and Egan believes that could yet stand to the team later in the year when the waters are less choppy.

“There's no denying we have a bit of a crisis with injuries at the minute, but we have tried to just focus on the positives,” he told GAA.ie at the launch of the 2026 Dalata Hotel Group U20 Football Championships.

“A lot of lads are getting exposed to high level football and making their first competitive starts.

“That can be a bit tough because it can be a baptism of fire for lads who are just getting thrown in but it will stand to us in the future.

“I think in these situations if the team stays together no matter what is being said outside the camp, you will be in a good place when things do break and we’ll have a very strong panel when all the lads do get back.

“It is quite a tough time in terms of losing four games in a bounce but we just have to try and focus on what is going well. There is lots of young guys standing up to the mark.

“The match against Derry was probably the outlier because before that we were competitive against Cork and Louth.

“Hopefully we can get back at it against Tyrone Saturday. We can either lie down and give up or just constantly keep trying to push on.”

The Offaly hurlers have been similarly weakened by a long injury list and they too have lost four from four in Division 1A of the Allianz Hurling League.

For a county like Offaly with a relatively small pool of players, some of whom like Egan himself play both club football and hurling, it’s easy to believe that the load placed on players could be a contributory factor.

The motion coming before Annual Congress on Saturday that seeks to introduce an ‘Inter-County Certification Programme’ proposes alleviating such overloads through strict adherence to any ‘return to training’ or ‘closed season’ stipulations and the mandatory sharing of gps and injury data so the Association would have a better understanding of what an optimum training load for an amateur GAA athlete should look like.

Egan sees some merit in such an approach.

“I think that could be quite important, to be honest, because monitoring GPS and stuff like that, it is so important in terms of these injuries like osteitis pubis that are coming from overuse,” he says.

“That is not happening by accident, you know, that has to be in the reports, that has to be in the data. So, it probably really is something that does need to be looked at.

“Most professional sports have realised that less is more. That if you can get a good bank of work done, then that should be it rather than a drawn out two months of slogging.

“It is probably a smart decision that they are looking at that because I think it could save issues in the future.

“The one thing I would say that could do with being a bit more set in stone would be a rest period for lads who go a long way in club championships before they return to inter-county set-ups.

“That they are not straight back in, that they do get a mandatory little bit of a break, because at the end of the day, it probably is all year round now, with the way it has gone.

“I play hurling as well so by the time you finish the club season, you are kind of thinking, geez, like, I don't want to think about the county season for a little while, I want to just have a little bit of time to myself here and then go back into it.

“If there was a bit more regulation in terms of that, yeah, it would make a bit of a difference.”

Egan knows only too well himself about the dangers of overload. A star of the All-Ireland winning Offaly U20 football team in 2021, the following year his body broke down under the strain of playing both codes for club and county.

He suffered two bad hamstring injuries, the second of which was a Grade 4 rupture that could have had long-term consequences had he not been as well looked after by Offaly GAA as he was.

The lessons he learned from the experience stand him in good stead to this day.

“The Offaly County Board, Michael Duignan was there at the time, and the care I got from those guys was absolutely massive,” says Egan.

“I went up to Santry and I was told I had to get surgery and that was that. They gave me a couple of choices.

“I could go down to Waterford for it and the other choice was go to London to this top, top surgeon, one of the best surgeons in the world, who was a hamstring specialist.

“I went back to Michael and was chatting to the county board and they said, 'Look, what did they say was the best solution? Forget the price, what's the number one solution for you to get back?' And I said, it was to go to London. They sent me over to London and got me to surgery in April 2022 and since then I've had no issues, thank God.

“It was a turbulent enough time but, looking back, those injuries made me really a lot more aware of my own limits.

“Now if I pick up a knock I'd be the first one looking to go get it checked and go to physio and get it scanned whereas before I probably thought I was a bit invincible.

“I'd have to stay on top of my prehab now for the hamstrings. As I found out, my issue was never actually the strength of my hamstrings, I had incredibly strong hamstrings, but just more so the flexibility. I was very, very rigid.

“I do a decent bit of driving up and down to Dublin so that's really something that I really focus on. I won't hit the pitch unless I'm feeling really loosened out after being in the car for maybe an hour or two.

“I'd be big into my recovery in terms of after games, before games, getting ready, how I prepare. It's probably something that before them injuries I wouldn't really have thought about, I'd just go out and play.

“I really think every small detail adds up.”

It’s been a tough Spring for the Offaly footballers, but Egan is still hopeful they can have a good Summer.

The Leinster football championship is more open than ever before, and he sees no reason why Offaly can’t have a good cut off it.

“We think we compete in Leinster,” he says. “We have Laois the first day out which would be a really tough test, they are a good side. A side that would have traded results with the last couple of years.

“So that's a game we will be targeting once the league finishes, and then I think it's Kildare after that in a quarter-final if we can win it.

“Leinster is after opening up a bit over the last year or two, especially with obviously Louth winning it last year. There probably are two or three top teams, but we would like to think that when we are at our best, we're up there with them.

“We were 10 points up on Meath last year and then they came back in the second half and started really lording two pointers from everywhere and we saw what they went on and done.

“We probably think we compete with those teams when we do have everyone fit so we'll see how we go. It's going to be an interesting summer, we just want to get as many lads back as we can and then we'll deal with what we have.

“There's still 30-35 lads there who are learning their trade as they go who are only starting out. I feel like an old lad nearly now and I'm only 22.

“There's a lot of young lads in there who are working hard, trying their best, and we're going to keep the show on the road.”