Cameron Dummigan ruled out for at least THREE MONTHS after latest operation

Cameron Dummigan will miss the first three months of the season at least, after undergoing an operation on a troublesome hamstring injury.

Dummigan has not featured in pre-season for Derry City and manager Tiernan Lynch, after watching his team defeat Ballymena United 1-0 at the Brandywell, revealed that Dummigan is set for a lengthy spell on the sidelines.

“Cameron has just got another operation, and we’re probably looking at another 12 weeks to be honest. It’s a huge blow for us, but hopefully when he comes back, he’ll be like a new signing for us.”

It is not the first time that the 28-year-old has suffered with injury, with his Derry City career, now heading into its fourth season, blighted in recent years with injury problems.

Brought to the club by Ruaidhri Higgins three years ago, Dummigan enjoyed a successful first season at the club, making 33 league appearances and 40 overall in all competitions, helping the Candystripes to European qualification playing the whole game as Derry City defeated Shelbourne to lift the FAI Cup at the Aviva Stadium.

However, a knee injury at a pre-season training camp in Spain disrupted his preparations for the start of the 2023 season, during which he started only 12 league games throughout the whole year. The injury meant he missed the first 15 games of the 2023 campaign before appearing as a late substitute against Bohemians at Dalymount Park in May.

Last season, Dummigan’s injury problems continued. Despite starting the first two games of the 2024 campaign, the midfielder suffered another setback, which meant that he only appeared once in the following 14 games. He did enjoy his best run of games in the summer period, when he appeared in 15 games in succession, but his season then ended prematurely when he suffered a hamstring injury against Waterford at the RSC in August. Overall, Dummigan made just 12 league starts again in 2024.

That bad luck from injury has really prevented Dummigan from building on his solid first season at the Brandywell, with knee and hamstring injuries meaning that the title winner with Dundalk has only completed 90 minutes 13 times in City’s last two league campaigns.

On the 1-0 win over Ballymena United Lynch said: “I’m a wee bit disappointed to be honest. I thought it was a wee bit slow at times, a wee bit laborious at times and we probably felt it a little bit at times. It was our second game in a week on pre-season, but if we had taken our chances in the first half, it probably would have been a very different game. It’s pre-season, there’s lots of things we’re trying to work on and lots of things we’re trying to introduce, we know it’s going to be a process, we know it’s not going to be a case of us just clicking our fingers and it’ll happen, we’ve just got to keep working at it.”