Carl McHugh grateful for head gash that may have saved career

Motherwell's Carl McHugh with the Betfred Cup. Picture: Craig Foy/SNS

As skipper he will have this opportunity providing Motherwell do what no other Scottish side have done for 18 months and overcome Celtic in Sunday’s Betfred Cup final.

But there is a sense McHugh is counting his blessings whatever happens. It was around this time a year ago that he could finally contemplate playing football again.

The long scar worryingly near his temple and above his right eye tells its own grisly story. But the 24 year-old Irish midfielder explains how close he was to giving up the game.

The prospect of a cup final to relish is a fitting milestone in a courageous journey back from desolate days striding along Donegal’s wide, sandy beaches while wondering if he might ever return to Motherwell.

McHugh’s Fir Park career had barely begun when it stalled in sickening fashion in August last year.

A clash of heads with Kilmarnock’s Dean Hawkshaw on his debut was the start of a worrying period for McHugh, who eventually went home to  Ireland to convalesce. The flesh wound he sustained looked like it could have come from an encounter with a shark. He was out for four months in total.

“That was a very difficult time for me,” he recalled. “I never thought back then that it would be possible to play in a final. It was a worrying time and there were periods when I feared I might not be able to play again.”

Alarmingly, McHugh wonders if he would even have come off were it not for the bloody gash. The long-term effects of concussion is becoming an ever-more urgent matter of debate. But, even as recently as last season, a patched-up McHugh was set to return for the next game, a League Cup tie against Celtic, before feeling unwell again.

“It was just before that game that I started to feel bad and develop the symptoms,” he said. “It just nose-dived from there and got worse and worse. The scary thing is that if my head had not been cut in the Kilmarnock game then I would probably have stayed on.

“You can put yourself in danger if you play on when you are concussed so the scar actually helped me, strange as it sounds. I just started getting nausea, headaches, sensitivity to light and that sort of thing.

“I’ve had no setbacks and, please God, that’s me in the clear now. But it’s [head injuries] a topical talking point in football at the minute and I think it merits the coverage it has been getting.

“I’m just very happy that I can play football,” he added. “As long as I can train all week and play on a Saturday that’s the main thing for me.”

Motherwell might be very long odds to beat Celtic but McHugh has experience of being an even more unfancied underdog.

He was at third-tier Bradford when they lost the League Cup final 5-0 to Premier League side Swansea in 2013. “We were probably even bigger outsiders for that one than we are this weekend,” he recalled. “We were a League Two club and, even though we’d knocked out three Premier League sides, we’d no right to be there in most people’s eyes.

“As it happened, Swansea were an excellent team. They were just too good for us on the day. Looking back on it now, just getting there was probably the achievement.”

McHugh stresses this isn’t the way he feels now. “We definitely want to win this,” he said. “We can’t have any regrets afterwards. You don’t want to be on the losing side in any final and we’re hoping to do the business against Celtic.”