Cork footballer Patrick Kelly feels he is unlikely to be fully fit in time for the Munster SFC quarter-final with Limerick on May 25.
Kelly, who underwent a hip operation in November, last night played his first competitive match since Cork’s All-Ireland semi-final defeat to Donegal in
August as his club, Ballincollig, took on Bantry Blues in a Kelleher Shield game.
Ballincollig face a second league game in four nights on Friday against Aghada, and Kelly is hoping to use the two matches to help him prepare for the county SFC first-round clash with Douglas on May 6, but he does not want to look too far ahead.
“I’ve trained fully with Cork for the last two
weeks,” he said, “but it has been a case of easing back into it, after drills you’d be feeling wrecked from it, it obviously takes time to get up to the level."
“I’m looking at the next couple of club games and then the county championship against Douglas, after that it’s less than three weeks until the Limerick match, so it will be hard to get fully fit in time for that.”
While Kelly would liked to have had some action during Cork’s Allianz Division 1 campaign, he was prevented from doing so as his recuperation took
longer than expected, though not because of any problems with his hip.
“After I had the operation I was told that it would take three or four
months,” he said.
“That would have been the end of March of the start of
April, and we had been erring on the side of caution but then I tweaked a calf
while running. I thought that it would cost me one or two weeks but it ended up
costing me five, though in a way it helped as it gave the hip more time to
recover.