Closing the final chapter of a sombre book

In the space of two or three seconds, Luke Fitzgerald found out just how fickle sport can be, writes Johnny Watterson

A YEAR AGO, as Luke Fitzgerald tells it, he was cutting inside Brian O’Driscoll and saw Australian Quade Cooper fanning across the pitch.

Fitzgerald thought to himself that he was in a position to line up Cooper and as he says “cut him in two”. Instead the Wallaby outhalf crashed into the Irish winger. Fitzgerald didn’t get up.

He put his hand to the outside of his hamstring and noticed that part of the muscle had disappeared. It seemed to have rolled up towards his hip.

“The lads were saying how does it feel? I was going ‘well, I can’t really feel that bit on my leg,’” he says. “That big line, it was gone. It just shot up my leg.”

They asked him if he could walk. But he couldn’t stand. The doctors took him off the field and had a closer look. Fitzgerald innately knew it was serious and began to cry. He saw the only career he had ever wanted fall apart in the medical room under the stadium in Croke Park.

“I was inside Drico and Quade Cooper stepped inside. I was going to try and cut him in half and he ended up cutting me in half,” adds the Irish left wing. “He slipped into me. It was one of those real unfortunate things. I couldn’t have gotten out of the way. It was just meant to be.

“When they told me how significant an injury it was there were tears shed. I won’t be ashamed of that. I was really upset that it might be the end. I just gathered myself and said listen there’s people in far worse situations than myself . . . I got to work with one of the best surgeons around, Ray Moran – we call him the ice man in Leinster.

“He was very reassuring in the initial periods. He had to give me very bad news. He assured me that I could come back and be able laterally, which was the big concern. He hadn’t come across one of these before.”

Even Arthur Tanner said he had never even seen an injury like it in 20 years working as a doctor with Ireland. Fitzgerald had also damaged ligaments in his knee and oddly enough, despite its rare incidence, Irish flanker, Kevin McLaughlin, suffered a similar injury five months later.

“They were consulting with guys with NFL backgrounds because that’s the only other place they’d really seen this. I think he (Moran) spoke to some surgeon in Abu Dhabi just to consult him about it. It was quite an unusual one. It was my LCL – Lateral Collateral Ligament – and bicep femoris, which is part of your hamstring. It was a nasty old job and he did great fixing it. Everything came back, all the movement, all the balance.”

As often happens when players realise how brittle they really are, once firmly-held priorities shift. The world becomes a different place, perspectives alter and horizons broaden. Recovery took him away from the top end of the game for a year with several months of that spent at home in Enniskerry, Co Wicklow where his mother and three sisters contributed to the rehabilitation process. Because it was a bad injury Fitzgerald had to step back to move forwards. Returning home was literally going back in time.

Today he is, you would almost say, radiant. Fitzgerald speaks like he has just closed a chapter in a nefarious, sombre book and arrived at a optimistic beginning in another. The freight of making his return for the first international rugby match at the Aviva Stadium is not lost on him and nor is the buzz of his current feeling of physical well-being.

“You realise how fickle sport can be, how quickly it can all change,” he says. “The injury itself was just two or three seconds. It changed the whole course of that year for me. I had no involvement. So yeah you get to appreciate it a bit more. I also spent more time on my own, in the gym. With an injury like that you have no lofty goals. My lofty goal was to get back.

“I felt like ‘Jesus I haven’t developed this other side of me that I might have done if I’d gone to college’. I felt a real need to catch up in that area. As well it made me appreciate the game. It’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do since I was six years old. I never wanted soccer, football or hurling. I always wanted to be a rugby player.”

Fitzgerald was on crutches for last year’s win over South Africa, his unlucky 13th cap arriving at the same time as Cooper and the Wallabies did two weeks before. Now 23 he’s back on the wing. He can now look at the tape and laugh. “I did a few soccer rolls when it happened,” he says in a confessional tone. “Lucky the injury was a bad one. The lads would have given me a terrible slaggin’.”