Murphy's return to fray the best possible news for Carlow

A lacerated kidney is not an injury associated with Gaelic football, yet for a while Carlow midfielder Brendan Murphy was left wondering when, if indeed ever, he’d be back playing to his best.

The answer came 50 minutes into Sunday’s O’Byrne Cup match against Dublin, when Murphy came off the bench, and soon fired over a superb 40-yard point. Carlow lost out in the end, but it gave Murphy all the assurance he needed, after several weeks of no assurances at all.

“I’m only back a couple of weeks, trying to get back into it, get the feel for the game again,” he says, having initially been told it could be March, at the earliest, before competitive football was back on the menu.

“I suppose they always give you the longest possible length of time, but I’m feeling good now. I’m back training three weeks now and everything has healed up nicely.”

Murphy sustained the injury playing for the Army, late last year, and the first instruction was to sit at home and do nothing: “It was a simple shoulder, when a player came at me, at more pace than I thought he was and either his knee or elbow collided with me. It was just a freak injury.

The real story

“I came off, thinking it was a dead leg, didn’t think too much more, but as it developed I realised what the real story was. I was in pain, but it just a matter of resting up, trying to get it healed, trying to put it under as little stress as possible.

“You’d be going mad lying around doing nothing and it’s frustrating watching the boys train and not being able to join them. So I’ll be ready to go for Wicklow on Wednesday and hopefully DCU on Sunday. It’ll be a tough week, but everyone is looking forward to it.”

Elsewhere, Waterford hurling will be down two midfielders this season with the news that Philip Mahony has taken the year out to travel, this coming on the heels of Stephen Molumphy’s unavailability due to Army duty.

Emlyn Mulligan, who came off the bench to steer Leitrim to victory over Roscommon in their FBD Connacht League, and having twice suffered cruciate injuries, has been named team captain for 2013.