Jack McCaffrey says he should not win Footballer of the Year

Dublin star Jack McCaffrey feels the Footballer of the Year award is only between his fellow nominees Ciarán Kilkenny and Brian Fenton.

With Sam Maguire set to stay Liffey-side for another winter, focus turns to awards season. The PwC All Stars are around the corner, with debate surrounding the Footballer of the Year gong.

With all three nominees, Dublin will have their first winner of the award since 2015 when McCaffrey scooped the honour. However, the Clontarf man feels it is between his team-mates, Ciarán Kilkenny and Brian Fenton.

"I don't think I'm in the running there," said the wing-back. "It's a massive honour to be nominated, but I think that award is between the two lads, and fairly justifiably so. May the best man win."

Given the difficult build-up he had to the 2018 championship given the cruciate injury, winning Footballer of the Year was not on his horizon for the 24-year-old at the start of the year.

McCaffrey said: "It didn't even enter my mind. That was just a frustrating performance. I've had other frustrating performances since. These kind of nominations aren't something you ever think about. You don't go out thinking, if I play well here this might happen.

"You go out trying to do your best for the team, and anything that comes after that, it's a bonus. It [Footballer of the Year nomination] is a massive compliment to be paid, but at the end of the day it's way, way behind winning an All-Ireland in terms of a priority."

It was a long road back for McCaffrey following a difficult winter, and it took him a while to shake off any nervousness about his knee.

He said: "A lot of the rehab is focused on building up confidence in the knee again so there's a certain amount of being a bit tentative or nervy at the start, but once you get into a match and someone hits you a shoulder or you're going for a ball or something, it's banished to the back of your mind and you just kick on with it. Once you've come through a couple of sessions, like, I wouldn't think of my knee at all now going out playing or training."

McCaffrey was not the only Dublin player coming back from a cruciate injury this year, as Bernard Brogan suffered a similar setback after the first league game of the year. The 2010 Footballer of the Year did seek advice from McCaffrey.

"Bernard was a bit behind," explains McCaffrey. "I was coming close enough to the pitch when he was starting off. He had a couple of issues to bounce towards me at the start, but the thing about cruciates, no more than any other injury, there's some things that would work for me and wouldn't work for him and vice versa.

"He sought advice from many other people and he was leaving no stone unturned, but it's not the kind of thing you want to be constantly looking at someone else."

While Brogan's recovery was thoroughly remarkable given the time frame in which he returned, McCaffrey's was not too bad either as he looks set to scoop his third All-Star award in the coming weeks.