David Reidy on being knocked unconscious: ‘My first memory was the physio ahead of me’

David Reidy remembers coming on to the pitch as a sub that sunny Saturday in Semple Stadium. He remembers waking up on it too, around three minutes later. Flat on his back, wondering why he had the Clare physio above him and the team doctor at his side. He doesn’t remember what happened in between, even though it’s the one thing anyone who watched hurling this summer remembers about him.In fact, when he first watched the game back, he saw a passage of play where the ball was coming towards him around midfield and his immediate thought was that the challenge must have come from behind. But he was 36 seconds ahead of himself. The shoulder to the head by Dublin’s Brendan Kenny that knocked him out in the next passage of play was very much fronton and happened much closer to the Clare goal. That’s how little Reidy knew of it.“I didn’t see the challenge coming in, obviously,” he says now. “I don’t remember the actual play when I rose the ball. My first memory was the physio ahead of me and my doctor to my left-hand side. And I’m going, ‘Why are they there? I’m okay. I want to get up and play on.’“And then they started asking me questions and I was trying to think of the answers. The first question was, ‘Where are you?’ And then I’m thinking to myself, ‘Where actually am I?’ And then I was like, ‘Yeah, no, I’m in Thurles. Yeah, Thurles.’READ MORE“And the question was asked again: ‘Are you sure you’re in Thurles?’ And then it got me thinking, ‘I’m actually not sure. But I do know I’m playing some sort of a game that I’m going to have to get back up and play. Yeah, I’m definitely in Thurles.’ So that was the first memory of when I woke up.”Three months on and Reidy is in good form in a busy week. His day job is in school supplies and it had him over and back to Düsseldorf on Wednesday. A red-eye first thing in the morning, late home that night. September is a hectic month in that game, especially when the other side of his life is humming too. His club, Ennis side Éire Óg, closed off a 35-year gap by winning the Clare championship last year and they’re back in a semi-final this weekend.Reidy is 33 this year, so while nobody is in any rush to retire him, he knows he has more of his hurling career behind him than ahead. He joined the Clare panel six weeks after they won the 2013 All-Ireland and has been a key figure for them since his championship debut against Limerick in 2015. He was brilliant during their run to the 2024 All-Ireland, grabbing himself an All-Star nomination along the way.For all that, he wouldn’t have been well known to many outside the hurling bubble until the moment, 66 minutes into this year’s All-Ireland quarter-final, when he went low to pick up a ball coming out of the Clare defence and was met in the head by Kenny’s shoulder. It was reckless from the Dublin substitute, who got a fully deserved red card for it. The game was stopped for 11 minutes while Reidy was tended to on the ground.Clare's Conor Leen with referee James Owens look on as David Reidy receives medical treatment during the All-Ireland quarter-final against Dublin at Semple Stadium in June. Photograph: Tom O'Hanlon/Inpho “It’s a funny one, because I would have got a lot harder belts throughout the years,” says Reidy. “I would have got more physical belts both on the ball and off the ball, and it’s just funny, a small clip at the wrong part of the head or the brain and something like that can happen. It doesn’t really go with the actual force of the challenge.“John [Hetherton, Dublin’s full-forward] was very good. He put me into the recovery position straight away. When a challenge like that happens or there’s contact in the head, nine times out of 10, the player’s not going to get a concussion. They might be down injured or their neck might be sore.“There’s usually a bit of a shemozzle because your team-mates don’t like to see anyone getting hurt or getting a challenge that they’re not comfortable with. John’s a big guy and if he’s going in, it would usually be to clear half the fellas out! But in fairness he put me into the recovery position, which was quick thinking on his behalf.”Everyone moved quickly. Michelle McNamara, the Clare team doctor, was at his side six seconds after he went down. She was joined immediately by their physio, Damien McMahon. Reidy can’t say enough about both of them and the care they took over him. He was unconscious for somewhere between a minute and 90 seconds, but they spent another 10 minutes preparing him to be stretchered off. All the while, the air drained entirely out of Semple Stadium.The game was live on RTÉ, both on TV and radio, as well as going out on Clare FM. Straight away, anyone tuning in could tell this was a serious incident. The TV broadcast didn’t replay it, and the long wait for the game to restart fed into the sense that Reidy could be in real bother. Although his girlfriend and his brother were both at the game, his mother was on holiday in Spain, watching on in an Irish bar. He knew they had to be panicking.“The one good thing was that it was near the end of the game. My girlfriend Jenny was over in the far stand and she was able to come over and get into the ambulance with me and come to the hospital. If it had been midway through the second half or something, that probably couldn’t have happened because we would have been away and gone to the hospital. So at least she was able to be there and to phone my mam and say I was laughing and smiling and whatever.David Reidy was nominated for an All Star after Clare's All-Ireland-winning season in 2024. Photograph: Morgan Treacy/Inpho “But for that first part of it, it was hard, because there’s commentators sitting in the press box and they don’t know what’s going on but they’re maybe speculating a bit. I heard people tell me afterwards that they heard I swallowed my tongue and all this sort of stuff. But that wasn’t the case at all.“At one stage, there was nearly a defibrillator being brought on. I wear a thumb strap on my left hand and a wrist strap on my right. And when I was unconscious, Michelle said to Damien that she wasn’t going to get a pulse from my wrist, that she’d have to get it from my neck. A normal conversation between two medics, but somebody took it out of context and called for a defibrillator.“Luckily, I woke up in the meantime and it went over the radio that I didn’t need one. But that eerie feeling in the stadium, if they’d seen a defibrillator coming on, it would have escalated the whole thing.”The ambulance brought him to hospital in Limerick where he spent the rest of his evening, in full Clare kit, on a trolley with his neck in a brace. As it happened, he wasn’t in a lot of pain. But there were other concerns.For one, he hadn’t eaten since their prematch meal, so by midnight he was starving. For another, like any intercounty player, he had been conscientious in his hydration ahead of a big game. And now, all those fluids needed somewhere to go.“That was my biggest issue!” he laughs. “I don’t know if you’ve ever needed a toilet break while you’re in a neck brace lying flat on your back, but it’s not the easiest thing in the world. When you look back, you can see the funny side of it. But I wasn’t laughing at the time!”David Reidy during the opening round of this year's Munster Championship against Waterford at Cusack Park in Ennis. Photograph: Natasha Barton/Inpho He was released around three in the morning and a neighbour came to bring them home. He woke the next morning feeling surprisingly fine – the squad had a recovery session in west Clare and his clubmate Shane O’Donnell came and collected him to bring him to it. Nobody made him go along but he felt he should, if only to show everyone that he was okay.And he was. That was the odd thing. He didn’t take part in the recovery session but he was, he felt, perfectly fine. He watches enough sports from around the world to know that there would be concussion protocols to navigate, but he wasn’t worried about passing them. In the ambulance, he had asked the paramedic would he be okay for the All-Ireland semi-final in 15 days. The response was along the lines of, ‘Let’s get to the hospital first ...’ but all in all, he was going well.By Sunday night, however, it was a different story. He developed a headache and soreness in the eyes, symptoms that continued the following day and into Tuesday. He went in to the UPMC clinic in Limerick and they ran tests on him that found that his reaction times were quite low. It was his first time doing these tests, so they had no baseline to judge it off. But if they stayed that low, the Limerick game was a non-starter.Over the space of the following week though, he improved. The headaches were gone by the Friday and he was keen to get back training for the following Tuesday. Initially, the Clare physio wanted him to wait until the last session before the semi-final, less than 48 hours before the game.But Reidy knew there’d be minimal contact in that session – if he wasn’t cleared to train the Tuesday before the game, it wouldn’t be feasible to include him against Limerick. He had to know that he was able to take full contact. Otherwise, he was no good to anybody.David Reidy will be in action with his club Éire Óg in the Clare senior hurling semi-final against Inagh-Kilnamona on Sunday. Photograph: Natasha Barton/Inpho “I spoke to our psychologist as well about it. There was no point going back in Friday because it would be nearly all non-contact. If there’s a 50/50 ball there, I needed to know that in my head I’m okay to go for it. Am I going to be able to go into the challenge, or is there a chance I will pull out? It’s too late to find out on Sunday in an All-Ireland semi-final against Limerick.”So they went back to UPMC and did the tests again, and the results showed a major improvement. Coupled with his lack of symptoms, they cleared him to go back training. He did enough to be included in the matchday 26 and when he was brought on in the 69th minute, there was a notable warmth in the applause that greeted him, with plenty of Limerick fans joining in. The game was on the line but everyone in Croke Park knew it was a win, whatever the result.Clearly, of course, it didn’t go how he wished. In more or less the next play after his arrival on to the pitch, Aidan O’Connor buried the goal that sent Limerick to the final. His season ended largely in lockstep with the frustrations that had gone before – always playing catch-up, held back by various niggles, struggling to make an impact where he was needed most. He scored one point all summer and was a sub for the last four games.“Overall, when you take the year as a whole, you’d be very disappointed. You’d be proud too, even if proud is maybe the wrong word to use. We emptied the tanks, we gave everything, and fairness to Limerick, they got the scores near the end that won it. It was probably just the test they needed before an All-Ireland final. I’d say Galway didn’t thank us for it anyway.”Best of all though, he has had no lasting effects from his injury. Kenny rang him the day after to apologise and wish him a speedy recovery, and that’s what he’s had. He took a break, got back with the club and they’re rattling onwards, trying to go back-to-back for the first time since 1956-57. Get past Inagh Kilnamona on Sunday and there’s no telling where it will end. Reidy will be giving it everything anyway.“I was very lucky. When you see the stretcher and feel the eeriness of the stadium, or listen to all the rumours, it could have been a lot worse. I got so many messages from players and people all over the country. There were mass cards being sent into Brian Lohan’s office even. But thankfully, I was very lucky.”