Growing injury list suggests something's not right

ON RUGBY:WHAT HAS happened to the injury ratio among Irish players? Time was when the IRFU's medical care and back-up were beyond reproach. Coupled with careful game management, this meant a relatively small pool of outstanding players could regularly pitch up and perform for country and province. But cracks are now appearing in the edifice.

Remember the 15 Untouchables? Eddie O’Sullivan’s favoured XV went through the entire 2007 Six Nations virtually en bloc, only Brian O’Driscoll and Peter Stringer missing the second game against France at Croke Park. Excused duty from the ensuing summer tour to Argentina, sure enough the Untouchables rolled up for the World Cup opener against Namibia despite O’Driscoll’s scare in the Battle of Bayonne.

Whatever went wrong in the World Cup, it wasn’t down to injuries, and between 2005 and 2010 only once did Ireland start more than 19 players in any one Six Nations campaign. Indeed, for the ’09 Grand Slam campaign, Declan Kidney could have picked the same 15 players for all five games had he so wanted, instead making three changes for the penultimate match against Scotland.

There were also a catalogue of players making remarkable recoveries against the projected time scale. Whatever injury a frontline professional Ireland player sustained, they would immediately be treated by the expert in that field, in Ireland or abroad.

In all of this, Dr Mick Molloy ran a very tight ship prior to his appointment to the IRB, with hand-picked specialist doctors, and the IRFU were justifiably proud of their medical care of players.

Perhaps injury ratios understandably climb after a Lions tour. And with the law amendments and increased number of collisions, a further increase in the number of injuries was perhaps inevitable. But then Dr Liam Hennessy, the union’s hands-on director of fitness, retired, and the long-standing Irish team doctor, Dr Gary O’Driscoll, also moved to London during the 2009 Grand Slam campaign to work with Arsenal.

Paul O’Connell and Keith Earls were increasingly struggling with groin injuries throughout last season, and by the end of the Six Nations they were running on empty. O’Connell hasn’t played since that final game against Scotland.

Initially, the infection on his pubic bone was not detected for six weeks, by which stage the infection had worsened considerably. Even then he was not diagnosed “exactly”, as he has delicately and diplomatically put it, while the first injection of antibiotics didn’t work. Eventually, the third bout of injected anti-biotics killed the infection, but that left him with a 12-week recovery from that juncture which has only recently allowed him to begin a very delayed pre-season.

The case with Earls is cloudier, but again there seemed a compelling case for ending his season long before he was originally chosen on the summer tour. Unsurprisingly, and thankfully, he didn’t tour.

Then there was the case of Gordon D’Arcy. He too needed a groin operation before the end of last season, and subsequently admitted that in the second half of the campaign he hardly trained, and hardly played without pain. Instead of having the operation at home and being granted a reprieve from the tour, he was taken to the Southern Hemisphere and played against the All Blacks, before Paddy Wallace was preferred for the games against the Maoris and the Wallabies. He then underwent surgery in Australia before flying home for Brian O’Driscoll’s wedding shortly afterwards.

Further evidence that players also need to be protected from themselves came with the case of Jerry Flannery. Last season featured a catalogue of abortive comebacks when troubled by Achilles and calf problems, limiting him to just five starts and one appearance each for Munster and Ireland. There appeared a compelling case for ending Flannery’s season once Munster went out of the Heineken Cup.

This view hardened when he aggravated his calf problem in the pre-tour defeat to the Barbarians at Thomond Park when his 25-minute cameo off the bench was cut short just before the end. Instead, he was taken on tour, trained at patently less than full tilt separately from the rest of the squad before, all too predictably, his tour was belatedly called off. His start to this season was delayed, and he has been limited to just one abandoned comeback off the bench.

In last season’s Heineken Cup quarter-final against Clermont, Jonathan Sexton sustained a fractured jaw. A plate was inserted the following day to help speed his recovery in time to play in the semi-final. Not only, as Leinster know only too well, did he miss the Toulouse match, but he also was taken from the field while warming up for the Barbarians’ match for treatment of an infection in his jaw.

Then there is the decidedly curious case of Andrew Trimble. He injured a finger in the opening tour match against the All Blacks, then played against Australia two weeks later before going on holidays for four weeks prior to returning to Ulster in pre-season.

Toward the end of July, an Ulster statement rather pointedly stated: “After his return to Ulster training this week, investigations into an injury sustained in the recent Ireland v New Zealand match have confirmed that Andrew Trimble will require surgery to repair a fracture dislocation of a finger on his left hand. Following surgery this morning it is anticipated that he will be out of rugby for 10-12 weeks.”

In the event, Trimble made his seasonal return in the third week of the Magners League against Edinburgh.

This is not to apportion blame at any individual(s), but if there are problems which didn’t exist before, the IRFU need to resolve them fairly swiftly.