IT began with a tear in the rotator cuff in his shoulder at the end of 2012, included a torn cruciate knee ligament, several hamstring tears and surgery on his ankle, but Jack McCarron hopes he’s climbed his way out of the injury hell that has obstructed his football career.
At 24 years of age, he is the name on everyone’s lips having hit 2-19 in four National League games, 2-7 of it from play.
Whether he is the answer to Monaghan’s troubles, whether he can truly ease the weight of pressure that Conor McManus carries, is something we’ll only know in time. But he looks the real deal.
He didn’t get it from the trees, for one.
His father Ray will go down as one of the all-time Monaghan greats after winning an Allstar in 1986. Jack is taller and of a slimmer build, but the devastatingly accurate left foot is in the image of his old man.
Jack’s mother Patricia is a sister of another Monaghan legend, Hugo Clerkin, making the young sharp-shooter a cousin of recently-retired Dick.
In her own right Patricia McCarron has been a lifelong stalwart of Currin club, always there in the background.
“People would always say about my father but my mother was very influential as well,” he says.
“She was mad to go to games, she’d bring you to watch wherever they were. Even at a young age she’d bring you to watch and bring you to training.”
It could have been soccer he chose, having played for Monaghan United and then Dundalk’s regional squads as a youngster.
But when Ray McCarron took over the club’s senior team in 2009, 16-year-old Jack decided it was time to make a call. The decision was only ever going to fall one way.
He was first called into the Monaghan panel for the 2012 Championship clash with Laois, though he was an unused sub that afternoon.
It was Eamonn McEnaney’s last game in charge of the county but he had long known the talent McCarron possessed. He’d had him with the under-21s that year, but it was in Ciaran Murray’s back yard in Clones, where he kicked about with McEnaney’s two sons before going to big games in St Tiernach’s Park, that he first became aware of a very young talent.
“His Mum and Dad, I know they’d go through every injury with him and the agony of watching him struggling and trying to get back,” said the former Monaghan and Louth boss.
It’s the stylish left leg that has taken the bulk of McCarron junior’s anguish.
October 1, 2014. It had been a relatively injury-free year in which he made a mark during the National League, starting their first six games and featuring sparingly in the summer, where he started the Ulster semi-final against Armagh and came off the bench in four of their other Championship games.
A nothing club game against Castleblayney when Currin were already relegated back to intermediate when he suffered a torn cruciate ligament in the left knee.
That was a year of inter-county progress gone. He returned in the late summer to play for the club and it was going well until he tore his hamstring in a challenge game in December 2015.
He returned to play 47 minutes against Cavan the following month in the McKenna Cup, but his entire year was a victim to the hamstring. One tear after the other.
And then just when he thought he was through it, two weeks after making his first Championship start for his county in the infamous defeat by Longford last summer, he went over on the ankle in a club game against Emyvale and tore the peroneal retinaculum.
That required surgery and it was only in injury-time in the draw with Cavan earlier in the League that he returned as a black card replacement. Since then, he’s played 280 almost unerring minutes.
“He’s always had that potential, he can kick points from 40 yards on the sideline. Most boys can kick a score from 25 yards but Jack is very accurate,” says McEnaney.
“He’s getting the bit of game time and a wee bit of confidence and it’s really helping him. He’d tell you himself he has a bit to do to be in there scoring consistently against the bigger team but he’s certainly well on his way.”
There have been a lot of long evenings spent in the gym rehabilitating over the past few years. McCarron is grateful that Malachy O’Rourke kept him in the wings of the squad, travelling with the team to games and offering him the best medical care they could.
A few one-to-one sessions with Ryan Porter as he was ready to return to the field brought him on again. The gym has rid him of injury but it’s his fondness for the feel of a size 5 that has honed the scoring ability he’s brought to the Monaghan attack.
“One thing is, being in training with the older lads in the Monaghan team, likes of Dick [Clerkin] and Dessie [Mone] and Paul Finlay, you see how hard they work at the training side of things. You try and work as hard as them.
“I try and go out and do a bit of shooting at least once a week on my own, for 30 or 40 minutes, and generally before a game I like to get out on my own once that week.
“At training you’d go early or stay back nights. If you can go to the gym half an hour or an hour an evening, I’m sure you can get out on the pitch and work on your skills an hour too.”
Watch this space.
