It’s a great shame that Darach Honan had to retire at 27.
The Clonlara club man will be fondly remembered for scoring the last goal of Clare’s landmark All-Ireland victory of 2013, a smashing goal at that.
His inter-county career was one that began as an underage star for the Banner, and it soon translated into senior success.
He had size, strength, pace, a deft touch and a fine strike. He seemed to have it all, and though he did have a successful career in the Saffron and Blue, injuries were always nagging, and eventually took their toll on him.
An ongoing hip problem has now culminated in an early retirement from the inter-county scene, and the question on everybody’s lips is why?
Honan was interviewed by Colm Parkinson on The GAA Hour Show on Thursday and he explained it better than any of us could.
“I’d rather to be still going, but unfortunately I just had to leave it,” began the Banner man.
“I had been dealing with it for a while where I was unable to train and play. It was only August that I was advised to totally knock it on the head,” he said regrettably.
The rangy full forward received warning signs in 2011, ones that looking back, he wishes he had heeded more.
“The problem arose initially in 2011, where it presented as osteitis pubis. I was unable to move freely, I was very stiff.
“The problem was with my hip, and not my groin, and I had to get two hip arthroscopies on either side,” he said.
“Once I knew that there was an issue in 2011, after that I should have been training smarter,” admitted the 6 ft 7 in attacker.
Since 2011, he had intermittent issues with his hips, but they never really hit him as hard as they did this year.
“It presented it again this year, with the cartilage between the joint being worn down significantly. The hip had deteriorated in the years since the operation,” he told Wooly.
Many initially presumed that his large frame was to blame, but Honan denies this, and feels overloading in training was more so at fault.
“The frame that I have is large alright, so that lends itself to injuries more often – it might be a contributing factor, but it’s definitely not the main one. It’s really a load management problem, overloading training and that,” he said.
Honan was one of a bunch of Clare players who had to undergo surgery for hip problems, which raised the inevitable question whether that was incidental, or indeed, a product of a radical training regime in Clare.
Certain drills they were doing didn’t help him, he said, nor did the rigorous training schedules.
“There’s Peter Duggan, myself, Cian Dillon, Conor McGrath, Seadna Morey who have all had these surgeries… When I came into the senior set-up, there was probably an overload there,” he responded
“Those sort of shuttle runs (Out to the 21 and back in), or long distance pounding of the ground. As well, when you’re training for longer than two hours, and then you’re training again the next day. Intensity of training for too long, or too many times in a week or something like that.
“It was probably too many trainings at the same time, and as I’ve said, there’s more lads who’ve had similar problems,” he added.
It’s a regrettable situation that Honan feels he could have avoided, but as the saying goes, hindsight is 20:20 vision.
As for other lads struggling with hip/groin problems, he urges you to let your manager know, not to put yourself under excess pressure and to ensure that you have your own programmes drawn out if needs be.
“I think I could still be playing if I had trained that bit smarter. If you look at any team, there’s going to be 35 different lads on it, different body shapes and sizes, different positions and any team, there’s no reason that everybody should do the exact same training, but that’s just common sense.
You can listen to the insightful Honan interview right here from 29″00′.
