Shane O’Donnell hints at one last hurrah with Clare as he commits for 2025 season

Shane O’Donnell has confirmed that he will play for All-Ireland hurling champions Clare again in 2025 - but has indicated that it could be his last season.

The 30-year-old favourite to be named Hurler of the Year played a key role in Sunday’s MacCarthy Cup final win over Cork, digging deep midway through the first-half to haul Clare back after a poor start.

He played over 80 minutes in all before coming off with cramp, an issue he reckons was probably linked to a hushed up hamstring injury sustained in training last Tuesday.

Speaking at the team’s hotel base in Dublin before returning to Clare, O’Donnell revealed that he initially thought he was ‘100 percent gone’ for the final after suffering the Grade 1A hamstring injury.

But he got through the landmark encounter and has now given Clare fans a further boost by stating that he will be back to play county hurling again in 2025.

The PhD graduate said earlier this year that he was considering relocating to the US but while he has put that off for a year, it looks like being a temporary reprieve.

Asked if he’ll be back for 2025, O’Donnell nodded.

“Definitely, I think it was after the Wexford or the Kilkenny game that we were chatting on the back of the bus on the way home and we all kind of said we were going to go for another year,” said O’Donnell, who turned 30 last month.

“At that stage I knew I was kind of tied in and Niamh, my girlfriend, we had talked about it a lot a month ago and just kind of said that going to America next year would be pretty tight so we are probably going to put it to the year after.”

O’Donnell, who has spoken of his desire to one day go into space as an astronaut, said he would be going to the US mainly for work purposes.

“Basically, yeah,” he said.

“Niamh’s Dad is American and she’d love to go back and live there for a bit and I’d love to live there for a bit. But it is work and career progression.”

O’Donnell reflected on the 11 years between his two All-Ireland wins, initially bursting onto the scene with 3-3 as a teenager in the 2013 final replay win over Cork.

If he’d wanted to, he could have hit the party circuit after that breakthrough win and embraced the good life.

“It was just not enjoyable to think about going that route,” he said.

“It wasn’t enjoyable to go out and be drinking and be pulled and dragged all over the place. Yeah, I guess it could have gone that way but in reality it was never going to. It was never really an option, nor did I ever entertain it.”

Hurling brought plenty of low points over the years, like their series of Munster final defeats, but the serious concussion injury sustained in training three years ago left him at rock bottom. For a while, he was resigned to not playing competitively again as he struggled badly with the brain injury and its consequences.

“I was afraid of it, there’s no other way to describe it, I was afraid of it happening again because it was such a hell of a summer,” he said.

“My girlfriend is a psychologist and she just said that exposure is how you get through all these things, you have to expose yourself to the thing that you’re afraid of.

“Basically that was the reason I went back hurling, she just said that if you decide not to go back, this is going to be lingering over you and you’re not going to be able to clear it.”

O’Donnell has skipped Clare’s National League campaigns since that injury, only coming on briefly this year in the final defeat of Kilkenny. That will be the same again next year.

“I enjoy everything that comes with hurling more when I take that longer time away from it,” he said.

“There’s a number of reasons, like, I get to live with my girlfriend up in Dublin. I don’t have to travel up and down all the time. There’s just so much I gain from not playing the league and having that longer off season and thankfully Brian Lohan and the management are brilliant about it.”