He made the people happy. He is happy to be done. Shane O\u2019Donnell has officially retired from intercounty and club hurling. It is time to walk away.<\/p>\n
The Clare star and two-time All-Ireland winner scored two points for \u00c9ire \u00d3g in their Clare SHC semi-final defeat. He had already declared that this season would be his last with club and county.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’m just glad that I got to choose the day that it was going to be, or the year that it was going to be,\u201d he said post-match.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was disappointing today, but I guess you have to try and look at the bigger picture, career-wise, or at least a few years, and be pretty happy with what we’ve been able to achieve as a player and club in the last few years.\u201d 2026 felt different. It took its toll.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo be honest, it was just taking more from me every year I was going back. It felt like the opportunity cost was growing. The other things that I was putting off, we always wanted to go live abroad.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was either now or never. And then this year, just before games, I didn’t have the same kind of mindset that I would have previously. I was just not looking forward to games in the same way.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don’t know what that word is. People always say burnout. I don’t know if that’s what it was, but it was just starting to be all effort and not much reward from it.<\/p>\n
When you go on the pitch, it is different. Obviously, you just get into it and you just play and do what you can. But the build-up and everything was just taking more and more out of me, so I just knew this year was going to be the last.\u201d O\u2019Donnell is a three-time All-Star and a Hurler of the Year winner. The Ennis club won a long-awaited county title last year. He has plenty of reasons to be content.<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously, the most immediate stuff is what you’re thinking about and disappointing year, this year, ultimately. Yeah, absolutely. I would have taken that every day of the week.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we were underage, we wouldn’t have been winning anything with Eire Og at all, a game, never mind a championship. To think that we would have won something like last year, win the club here or with Clare, that would have been unfathomable. That I would have been making Clare teams, playing with Clare and being able to achieve with Clare, just completely was not within the realms of possibility.<\/p>\n
\u201cI guess you take it a day at a time. I’ve been extremely fortunate to be able to get where I get to. The players I’ve had an opportunity to play with and the friends I’ll have for hopefully forever, based on that.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has been an incredible journey. We’re looking to move to New York. That’s the plan, trying to put things in place.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’m going to move with work. Just trying to move on. Even if we weren’t to move, I still think it would be the right time to move on.<\/p>\n
\u201cLike I said, this year was just a little bit different. I’m not sure how to frame it. The burning desire to be out on the pitch was starting to weigh in a small bit.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just think it is time to move on. I live up in Dublin with my fianc\u00e9e now. Each year I have to move home to Clare to play.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou’re trading off so much in your regular life just to keep playing. At 13, 14 seasons at senior level, there has to be a point where you move on. I’m just glad that it is not a point where I break my leg and the option is taken away from me and it’s forced upon me.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’m glad to be able to make that decision.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He made the people happy. He is happy to be done. Shane O\u2019Donnell has officially retired from intercounty…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":638620,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[30041,42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-638619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-clare-gaa","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=638619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638619\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/638620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=638619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=638619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=638619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}