WHEN Mark Landers woke up on the Sunday morning after Imokilly’s Cork SHC quarter-final victory over Newtownshandrum in August 1999, he knew he was in trouble.

He had started at centre back in a two-point victory but ended up at full-forward after he sustained a knee injury after just 20 minutes on the previous evening.

He recalls “a fair bit of throbbing in my leg” immediately after the game and a night’s sleep hadn’t eased the problem. And so the call went in to Dr Con Murphy, who was on holidays in Kerry at the time.

Murphy went through his extensive list of contacts and on Monday morning, Landers was scheduled for surgery at Tralee General Hospital, to remove cartilage from his injured knee.

Landers was Cork’s captain at the time and with an All-Ireland against Kilkenny on 12 September  looming large on the horizon, his chances of playing appeared bleak.

But even though the Killeagh man underwent surgery on 17 August, he was deemed fit enough to line out against the Cats and a glorious Sunday afternoon for the Rebels would finish with Landers uttering the immortal words: “Welcome back to Leeside, Liam MacCarthy, we’ve missed you a lot!”

Landers recalls: “When I woke up I knew I had problems.

“Dr Con told me to come straight to Kerry for a look at the knee. He did his normal test and said ‘you’ve a problem here — the cartilage is gone.’

“Dr Con told me that I wouldn’t play in an All-Ireland final without an operation. For an hour and a half or two hours, he went away ringing every surgeon that he could get in touch with.

“Dr Michael Murphy in Tralee was the surgeon who operated on me.”

As soon as the operation was over, Landers went to live with Liam O’Reilly, who was Rob Heffernan’s coach leading up to the 2012 London Olympics, in Bandon.

The Cork county board covered the costs of his rehab and in the first of three weeks in O’Reilly’s company, Landers shed seven pounds.

He smiles: “I leaned up more than anything. Ten days into recovery, I came to training and (selector) Johnny Crowley said to me that if I lost any more weight, I’d lose myself!”

Ten days before the final, Landers rejoined the Cork squad for training. He trained again on the following Thursday night and was boosted by Jimmy Barry-Murphy’s decision to start him against Kilkenny.

“I was lucky,” Landers says. “I responded well to the rebab. I did what was required and we got there. I was still fit but I had half a stone that I could shift in that space of time.

“Part of those training sessions were 20-mile cycles at half seven in the morning and in the evening, we would go the sea for an hour, aqua jogging in a suit.”

The stories remain etched in his mind. Like the time when Oliver O’Loughlin from the St Ita’s club was watching Landers drift out to sea during one of those aqua sessions in Youghal. O’Loughlin was about to dial the coastguard before Landers began to drift back to shore.

There was also the time when Teddy Owens and Seanie O’Leary arrived one morning to check in on Landers. O’Reilly had already worked on Landers’ injured leg, massaging it out, before the pair embarked on a 25-mile cycle.

Owens and O’Leary decided that they would come along too but they preferred the more conventional mode of transport and drove instead.

“That was the first time they were convinced that I had a good chance of making the final!” Landers laughs.

For those few weeks, Landers immersed himself in whatever O’Reilly asked him to do. He lived the life of a professional – diet, training, massage, physical therapy, stretching, weights, strength training, swimming, aqua jogging, cycling – and a little bit of hurling thrown in for good measure. And he made it.

“I remember the whole lot of it (All-Ireland final day),” Landers recalls. “I must say that I was really mentally very well prepared. An awful lot of that was down to not getting caught up in the stuff going on in towns and villages all over the county.”

Landers was taken off in the second half, at a time when he felt that he was motoring well.

Barry-Murphy felt that fresh legs were required to steer the ship home but he could tell that Landers was disappointed. And so, when the full-time whistle blew, JBM sought out his captain.

“Get up there and do your county proud,” he urged Landers.

And that’s exactly what he did.

“I’d done a little bit of preparation for it,” Landers smiles. “I had the Irish done anyway, just in case. I think you have to respect the position that you’re in.

“I remember a comment from one of my own club mates, the late Tom Fitzgibbon, who liked the word ‘back’ rather than ‘home’ in those few words.

“You said welcome back, not home, Tom said to me. Because Liam MacCarthy only rests in a county for 12 months. And Leeside is a place that everybody would associate with Cork. It was nine years since Liam MacCarthy had been in Cork and we did miss him a lot.”

It’s been eight years since he was last seen around the county but even if Pa Cronin does lift the precious silverware next Sunday evening, Landers will still hold onto a proud record.

“From what people tell me, I’m the only person from a junior club to captain Cork to win an All-Ireland,” he explains.

“The reason for that is that at the time, the senior county champions had the nomination for the captaincy, and Imokilly, a divisional team, had won the county (1998).

“Timmy McCarthy and myself were in the running for the captaincy. Joe Deane was playing for UCC at the time, he wouldn’t have qualified.”

And so it came to pass that Landers got the nod. Not even surgery would stop him from playing a huge part in hurling’s biggest day.

Liam MacCarthy? They’d missed him quite a lot alright.

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The Thai Tims are supporting the Dubs with their version of Molly Malone