DURING the Dr McKenna Cup, there must be around 500 substitutions made in the pre-season competition. Maybe more.
Whatever the tally is, it’s ridiculous.
It’s a little-known fact that a flurry of substitutions towards the end of a McKenna Cup is the bane of a reporter’s life, especially when there’s a mid-week deadline hanging over them.
But, within a lot of those substitutions in the dying embers of games, are important narratives and trajectories.
They can be little footnotes about comebacks, the humble start of a senior inter-county career, or possibly the end of one that never really got going in the first place.
There are countless young players eager for minutes, and older players equally so.
Kieran McGeeney’s fifth and final substitution during Wednesday night’s McKenna Cup win over Tyrone was Ciaron O’Hanlon for Mark Shields.
What may have appeared as a mere footnote to the casual observer on a freezing night at The Athletic Grounds was a much bigger deal.
To describe O’Hanlon’s 64th minute introduction as a footnote doesn’t do justice to the Killeavy man’s narrative.
O’Hanlon’s story is one of remarkable resilience. The fact that he was on a football field at all on Wednesday night was a bigger deal than any final scoreline.
When you sift through the list of debilitating injuries he’s endured over the past 10 years, few imagined seeing his name on the Armagh team-sheet again.
Do a Google search on him and it reads like a tale of woe. One of the first stories that pops up is: ‘Where are they now?’ and another is the player’s desire to make up for lost time.
If the 28-year-old manages to stay injury-free in 2024, that Google search will evolve; it’ll contain happier chapters and focus more on what he did on the field than the stresses he’s suffered off it.
In roughly the 10 minutes he was on the field on Wednesday night, he reckons he got five touches of the ball.
Before that, he can’t actually remember the last time he played for Armagh.
He guesses it was a NFL Division One game against Kerry in March 2022 when he had to come off in the 17th minute for Jason Duffy.
In an interview with my colleague Cahair O’Kane 12 months ago – another article that lamented his desperate injury woes - he estimated the former teenage sensation played a mere eight hours of Championship football for Armagh in seven years.
Even when he was cutting a dash for St Paul’s, Bessbrook in the 2013 MacRory Cup – where they lost the final by a point to St Pat’s, Maghera – he had troublesome knees.
For the next decade, knee tendonitis played havoc with his playing career.
It sometimes feels like he’s talking about a different person and a different career when he reflects on being handed his Championship debut for Armagh seniors by Paul Grimley a few months after playing in MacRory Cup final.
A decade ago, the Orchard men were rough around the edges and very much a work-in-progress team.
Cavan wiped the floor with them in Breffni Park and O’Hanlon has few happy recollections of the day itself.
“It wasn’t the dream that I thought it was going to be - or what the media expected,” he says now.
While trying to cope with training loads and minding his knees at the same time, he suffered subsequent shoulder and ankle injuries that derailed many hopeful summers.
He headed off to Sydney, Australia in 2017 with his girlfriend for a couple of years and kicked some ball for the McAnallen’s club.
He was in perpetual pain but the football wasn’t as intense and so he got by.
In 2021, he got his first clear run with Armagh and played in nearly every game – but the tendonitis issues always returned.
He played little football for them in 2022 and ruptured his patella in a club game against Clann Eireann in the autumn of that year.
An MRI exposed the extent of the injury and within 10 days he’d surgery over him.
Kieran McGeeney and Armagh, he says, “couldn’t have done enough” for him before, during and after the operation.
“For 10 years, you’re constantly trying to play through it,” he says. “It’s like driving a car with bald tyres – they’re going to blow up at some stage. That’s where it ended up for me.”
Given the grim set of circumstances Ciaron O’Hanlon has faced for the best part of 10 years – the constant pain, the erratic and cruel trajectory of knee tendonitis, the comebacks, the setbacks, the loneliness of the gym, the shifting feelings between hope and hopelessness - the Killeavy man is a glowing parable for never giving up.
When reporters are scribbling furiously into their notepads towards the end of McKenna Cup games – only seeing jersey numbers come and go - O’Hanlon galloping onto the field on Wednesday night, a footballer absolutely ravenous for game-time, would do your heart good.
He works alongside Brendan McVeigh, the Down former goalkeeper. McVeigh sent O’Hanlon pictures of him cliff jumping while on holiday.
Perhaps it’s McVeigh’s way of trying to replace that adrenaline rush inter-county football gave him for so many years.
“Playing football is all I’ve ever done,” O’Hanlon says.
“All I’m trying to do is represent myself and Armagh as best I can. It’s so hard to replace that adrenaline rush. I suppose I don’t fully know that as I’m still playing, but I just want to chase that feeling for as long as I can.”
Given the injuries, he could easily have disappeared from our radar years ago.
Ciaron O’Hanlon wearing an Armagh jersey on Wednesday night and competing at the highest level again is an astonishing feat of human will.
Being back at all is bigger than any end-of-game scoreline.