Ferbane ace reflects on long road back from injury ordeal

By Kevin Egan

The potency of youth is such that there will always be prodigious teenagers emerging out of the wilderness. In strong and weak counties alike, every few years a school student will come along that wastes no time in marking themselves out as different from the rest, capable of flying higher and soaring longer.

But regardless of the metric of measurement, Cian Johnson’s emergence onto the Offaly scene was more explosive than most. The 2017 Offaly minor final between Ferbane/Belmont and Edenderry was the bottleneck, with Johnson in green and Cian Farrell in red, both marked out as prodigious attackers for whom the sky was the limit.

Ferbane/Belmont won well, with Johnson shooting 2-7, 2-3 from play. The following January, aged just 18, he scored 0-6 from play against Dublin in the O’Byrne Cup and his inclusion in the county U-20 panel at the expense of the seniors, due to a local policy put in place to give priority to the underage grade, was quite controversial. All of that made what followed over the next few years that bit more frustrating – most of all, for the player himself.

“It was just basically a Gilmore’s groin injury that took way longer than it should have to recover from,” he explains to the Offaly Independent.

“We were playing Tullamore in the 2020 semi-final and it was getting bad. I got an injection to play the game, which in hindsight was the worst decision I’ve ever made in my life. We played, it went to extra-time and we lost on penalties. I played 80 minutes that day not feeling anything because I was under the injection. I woke up the next morning and couldn’t even walk.

“That was the start of it. I went back into Offaly that winter, it wasn’t coming right, so I got the surgery at the Mater Hospital.

“It’s meant to be a fairly routine surgery, three months. And from when it happened to when I played again, it was 18 months. There were stages where I genuinely thought I wouldn’t play again,” he continues.

If it had been a complicated leg break or an ACL injury, the longer time-frame might have been easier to handle. Instead, the uncertainty only served to deepen the mental anguish, not to mention exacerbating the amount of ground that he lost in terms of his physical and football development.

“It was difficult, it definitely was. Anyone who knows me knows how much I love football and I love playing for Ferbane in particular. But I actually stopped going to games, which is crazy stuff looking back on it now.

“I think I’m out the right side of it and I’ve built resilience from it,” he says, and there’s no doubt that the whole process certainly caused him to engage in no small amount of self-reflection.

“I’ve probably got incrementally better as the years have gone on since coming back but I still was nowhere near where I should have been. It’s frustrating and it’s humbling when you’re out there and there’s someone getting the better of you, and people are looking at you going, ‘he’s half the player he used to be’.

“I hadn’t gone to any Offaly games since the injury because I felt I should have been out there. And it’s tough, not because of management, just my own fault that I wasn’t out there. So, just seeing them win Division Three this year and being so close to winning the county title with Ferbane, I just said, this Christmas, right, I’m just going to do everything I can to try and get back to the level, fitness-wise.

“Since January I’ve done nearly 200 sessions between gym and pitch, just trying to get myself in the best shape possible to give myself a chance. The decision is out of my hands but all I can do is keep my head down, work hard and hopefully, whenever the year is done with Ferbane, I’ll get a call to go back in with Offaly.”

The role of joint-captain this year may have been an influence or perhaps it was just the rocky road that the 25-year-old has been on up to this point, but either way, there’s no doubt that the attacker is very conscious of everything he does now, particularly taking responsibility for what he needs to do, while understanding his limitations as well.

“I’d always be just playing with the ball at home. Or just going for a walk, bringing the ball with me. I think an underrated thing in football is your first touch on your hands and your skill. Especially in the full forward line, when you need to receive the ball and give it to someone off your shoulder," he says.

"I think people look at football as you turn up and you play. Whereas people would say in hurling, you need to be up against the wall the whole time. I think that’s a very underrated part of the game. Obviously, my finishing is something that I pride myself on. I’d be first into training, practising after training, bag of balls on my own. I think a lot of lads don’t take it serious enough.

“You go down to club training and you see lads standing around trying to hit the crossbar. Lads taking 45s that won’t be near them in a game, that stuff drives me mental. I think you know your range, you practise where you know you can score from, you do that over and over again. When you’re in the game situation, you know you have it from here.”

The precociousness of youth is gone, but the deliberate, thoughtful Cian Johnson will be a force to be reckoned with when his takes on Tullamore this Sunday afternoon.