In 2021, I had a good season under my belt, stayed injury-free, and broke into the team.

“I was on the panel in 2020 but didn't get much of a look in. The brilliant thing about Colm was that he said come back in again when you are ready. It took me a serious amount of time to come back from that. It was one thing after another constantly,” he said of that particular setback. “I did my cruciate then at the end of 2018. His place in the pecking order he was determined to change in 2019. O’Neill was an option but not first choice. The Banner were well stocked at midfield with Gary Brennan and Cathal O’Connor. He made the matchday panel on Sundays, but no one beckoned him down from the stand. He began commuting down to Caherlohan and Cusack Park for championship-tuning sessions on dry sod. He accepted Collins' invitation to rejoin the Clare camp. When those calls come, you can't turn them down. In between the 2018 Allianz League finishing up and Munster championship throwing in, an old number popped up on his phone screen. He spotted O’Neill faring well for Naomh Olaf. While I was taking football seriously up in Dublin, it was because I wanted to do well for my new club.”Ī member of Colm Collins’ backroom team was Dublin-based. Save for a retirement statement, his inter-county story was finished. He transferred to Naomh Olaf on the city’s southside.

“I initially travelled up and down for around 18 months to play for Éire Óg, but the travelling got to me after a while.” A good few of my mates had moved up, so that was the route I took. “There was a heap of work opportunities to go to Dublin. “I got frustrated with it all,” said O’Neill, looking back. And although he got back for a bit of the championship, he didn’t feature. The leg break saw him miss the following year’s league. He came home from the J1 and broke his leg while lining out for Éire Óg Ennis in the county championship. But surely there’d be another provincial final outing not too far down the road.Įleven years later and that box will finally be ticked on Sunday.Īnyway, back to 2012. It was a decision that cost him involvement in the county’s most recent Munster final appearance. There was life to be lived outside the four white lines. It was his last summer as a college student. In 2012, he hit off to America for the summer. That ruled me out for the rest of the inter-county season.” “A week after I started against Cork in the championship, I broke my hand in a challenge game against Waterford.

“It was a bit of everything,” O’Neill begins. Another Munster quarter-final appearance, 10 years after his first. When his championship appearance count eventually doubled from one to two, O’Neill had gone from 20-year-old rookie to 30-year-old returnee.

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