It took him from July to July, Kilkenny to Kilkenny, a full year ’til that Saturday.
But just as everything changed for Ryan Taylor during the 2023 All Ireland semi-final when he had to come off, everything changed in the 2024 All Ireland semi-final when Clare simply had to bring him on.
He hadn’t played a single minute of competitive hurling in the intervening 365 days. He played as if he’d never been away, never torn his cruciate.
Clare were trailing by five points when Taylor came on in the 49th minute. By the time the final whistle sounded with him “on his bike” as Anthony Daly put it, bursting out with another ball, they were ahead by two.
His was less of an introduction as an intervention. With his first two plays he engineered two scores. He tore into rucks, tackles, made another four positive plays on the ball. “Ryan Taylor changed the game when he came in,” Jackie Tyrrell would surmise in the RTÉ box. “[There was] just a different flow.”
For Tommy Guilfoyle, Clare FM’s resident analyst, it made sense that Clare only began to tick when Taylor came on. “Because,” he says, “he makes Clare tick.
“To me he was as important as any player to us in 2022 and 2023. When Tony Kelly and himself were both out all through the league and early on in the championship, I was saying that Taylor was just as big a loss as Tony.
“We have no one similar to play the role that he plays. He can sit in front of the halfback line and pick up the breaks which we’ve been missing all year, yet still go forward and be able to take a score – while still minding his own player.
“You can say a guy who is a good hurler can play midfield, but a lot of the time a game can pass them by. They’ll be in the wrong place in the wrong time. Taylor has that awareness to always be in the right place at the right time.”
Well, almost always. Just before the half-hour mark in last year’s semi-final, Taylor jumped to try to control a deflected clearance with his hurley around the centre of the field.
“I landed on my right leg and was in a fair bit of pain for a short while,” Taylor himself recalls. “Then it kind of subsided. The physio knew I was in a bit of trouble but I wanted to stay on in case I could run it off. But a couple of minutes later I knew some damage had been done and signalled to the lads that I had to come off.”
A few days after Clare’s defeat, Taylor had to cope with another undesirable result: the MRI scan showed he’d done his ACL. He went up to Professor Cathal Moran in Santry and was told with his knee as swollen as it was he’d have to wait another seven weeks for surgery.
“It’s one of those injuries as a sportsperson that you don’t want to hear. And for a few days I was probably down about it. But you eventually accept it and say, ‘Look, you’ve just got to get on with it.’ And once you get a date for the surgery you start to work towards that.
“I found the prehab process tougher than the actual rehab after the surgery, just trying to reduce the deficit of recovery involved when you come out the other side of the surgery.
“The early days then [post-surgery] when I’d be getting tests, I was expecting to see really good results but they showed I wasn’t making the progress I had hoped.
“But I talked to other lads who had done their ACL. Aaron Shanagher, Ian Galvin. I picked John Conlon’s brain a lot about where he was at different stages. And he told me that his initial tests weren’t that good either, that it goes like that.
“Initially in my head I was thinking, ‘I’ll be back here for April. Championship.’ I thought that was a very reasonable date. But I was probably naïve. It took that bit longer than I thought it was going to take. By February I realised I probably wasn’t going to make it by April 21 [the opening game against Limerick]. But I was still saying to myself that I’d be back at some stage to play some part.”
All through he stuck to the process outlined and supervised by lead team physio Shane Malone. At least once a week he’d go into Malone’s clinic in the Limerick TUS Moylish campus for a session outside of their work by the side of the pitch at Clare sessions. Tommy Corbett, the Clare selector and also a neighbour now in Quinn’s native parish of Clooney-Quin, testifies that when he’d be out for a walk he’d often bump into Taylor coming back from the new club gym they knocked on doors together for a few years ago.
He came to embrace every part of the comeback, even the incessant question that’d be posed to him behind the bar of Taylor’s, the bar in the centre of Ennis that he and his family runs and owns: When will you be back?
“I didn’t mind that. I like talking to people. I’d just tell them that I hadn’t a fixed date. ‘The rehab’s going well. Hopefully I’ll be back at some stage.’”
It took until the week leading into the Munster final before he was taking part in contact drills and small-sided games. The week before the quarter-final against Wexford then he played a full part in the AvB game. Corbett could see him clicking up the gears and moving up the grid. By the time of the Kilkenny game they had little choice not just to include him on the matchday 26 but bring him on. His progress that for so long was slow, slow, was suddenly rapid.
“Some lads talk about it taking them awhile to get back into it,” says Taylor, “but I felt comfortable fairly quickly. I didn’t seem to have any fear around getting reinjured.
“Brian will only put you in the 26 if you’re performing in training. It’s very cut-throat, all performance-based; whoever is playing best gets the jersey: doesn’t matter who you are or how often or little you’ve played in the past. I felt I was going well in training and thankfully he gave me the chance [in the semi-final].
“I suppose [in the lead up to the game] you’d have doubts in your head when you haven’t played in so long. ‘Am I ready for this? Have I done enough work? How am I going to play here?’ But as soon as you get into the game all that vanishes.
“I’d like to think I haven’t lost any of my pace so when I came on I just tried to give us that extra boost around the middle, especially with lads getting a bit tired.
“I would have been happy with a couple of minutes so to get 20, 25 minutes was brilliant. After a lot of hard work over the 12 months, I was over the moon to contribute to the team.”
His contribution could be from the start the next day; in recent days Seánie McGrath in these pages has claimed it should. In 2022 and 2023 Taylor was the most consistent scoring midfielder in the country; in the 15 championship games Clare played over those two summers, he failed to score in only one of them, a blowout quarter-final win against Dublin in which he didn’t need to. His cumulative tally over that period was 0-22, five more than the Limerick tandem of O’Donovan and O’Donoghue combined.
But that’s not even half of what he brings. When Tony Kelly was recently asked to pick the ideal composite player, he went with the skill of Joe Canning, the game intelligence of Noel McGrath and for pace Ryan Taylor.
Taylor brings an intelligence himself, and not just because he has a postgrad in data analytics and prefers to reach for a non-fiction book than the remote to see what’s on Netflix (asked if he’d recommend a book for us to read on our post-All Ireland holiday and he suggest Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind).
Asked to describe Taylor the player and person and Corbett goes for “Mannerly. Dynamic. Smart. He knows where to be and what to do.” He’s 29 this year, something of a veteran yet not one of the class of 2013 who have already experienced the high of reaching the mountaintop; he was on Hill 16 that magical Saturday afternoon, a year out of minor and a year before he’d be a fringe panellist on the county U21 that would win another All Ireland. He’s been on the senior panel 10 years now yet despite playing in four Munster finals and four All Ireland semi-finals has yet to touch any silverware or play in the sport’s biggest game. The years, and especially this past one, means his hunger is greater than ever.
“I’d never really suffered any injuries in my career up to this one. At most missed only the odd game or two [like the start of the 2023 league]. So it was a big change for a year not to be out there. But it kind of gave me a break from hurling as well. And while I’d obviously prefer to have been playing, you’ve to take whatever positive you can from it. And I feel I’m really refreshed and hungry for it having been away.”
Mad for road after the long road back.
