Smash hit

Hughes is one of a handful of qualified people in the country who practise sports vision, a level of optometry that specialises in sports. He has worked with scratch golfers, snooker, soccer, rugby and GAA players and his experiences have transformed the way in which he deals with problems. In his professional opinion, sports vision in hurling is an area that is waiting to explode.

“A lot of guys now are looking at computer screens all day long and it’s very intensive work for their eyes,” says Hughes. “When you go out playing sport afterwards, you’re projecting things differently. A person who is long-sighted would often imagine a ball is in a certain place but it’s that split-second away. I would feel myself, for example, that left-eye dominant people would be far more comfortable playing in left-sided positions. The dominant eye processes the visual image milliseconds before the other eye and that makes a huge difference at the top level when the game is so fast.”

If a player is tested by an optician, it’s on the basis of high-contrast vision, with black letters on a white background. The real and sporting world, though, is a low-contrast one with factors such as sunlight, rain and moving targets. How a person would perform in a sporting context could be judged only from a low-contrast chart.

“When you visually rank these guys (a GAA panel), I can guarantee you that the guys who are lowly ranked would be lowly ranked in a skills test on a similar scientific method,” says Hughes. “But a lot of those deficiencies can be corrected through exercises and using proper lenses.”

Most top athletes wouldn’t have reached the top in their sport with poor vision but there are always exceptions. Brian Corcoran has had defective vision in his right eye for as long as he can remember and he often had difficulty on the field trying to judge distances and tracking a sliotar flying at him. It takes an extremely talented player to overcome those difficulties and still excel. Corcoran was one of those players.

The products and assistance are there now to deal with defects, improve visual capacity and subsequently increase performance. Other aspects such as eye-training methods would improve co-ordination of the two eyes and increase cross-dominance.

Last year a number of England’s Ashes-winning team benefited from specialist coaching from the ProSports Vision Company. Marcus Trescothick, the second-highest scorer in the Test series, noted afterwards that the training had recorded benefits in dynamic vision perception and had helped when batting. There are many similarities between cricket and hurling in terms of judging high-speed balls.

Cusack says: “There are parts of your body, like your legs, that need to be strengthened to give yourself overall efficiency. That’s not considered a big deal but I’m convinced that your eyes are the same as any other part of your body.”

If there is an edge out there, Cusack will find it. He won’t leave anything to chance, especially when the tools are now there to help him to become a better player.