Updated 17.00
IRELAND LOOSEHEAD PROP Cian Healy is confident he will return to fitness in time to play a full part in Ireland’s warm-up for this year’s World Cup.
Healy has not played since Leinster’s loss to Ulster in Belfast last month and initial concerns over his neck injury suggested he may miss the World Cup.
However, after consulting with surgeon, Ashley Poynton, such fears were allayed.
“I was sat down and told everything. And that, all going well, I’ll be ready by the end of July to be hitting scrums and full tackles,” Healy said at a promotion for Flexiseq, a gel joint pain which is fitting enough for a man enduring neck trouble.
“After surgery, he came out and said that everything went as well, if not better than expected.”
Assuming all goes well in his recovery, Healy expects to be training fully over a week before Ireland’s opening warm-up Test in Wales on 8 August, six weeks before the World Cup kicks off.
The Ulster fixture was Healy’s third since starting the final fixture of the Six Nations against Scotland. However, the 27-year-old feels the problem began with the Champions Cup quarter-final win over Bath:
“Coming out of the Bath game I started to notice it a bit more. The pain in it got worse over the next while and stuff. It wasn’t until, I think it was Treviso, I just said ‘Jeez, will we go to a specialist?’ Because the nerve was getting very sore and very uncomfortable.
“[Even] sitting around. You can’t stretch to relieve nerve pain or anything like that. It’s not like a sore hammy or a sore leg or whatever. We just went to see the specialist, and he just said straight up: ‘we’re in tomorrow’. I said, ‘right, grand’.”
The message was clear enough between surgeon and patient, but the uncertainty arising from medical updates still left some members of the Healy family concerned.
“I don’t really read the papers, so I had my mam coming in to me saying ‘are you going to miss the World Cup?’ It was never an issue to me. They said there was a possibility, but 90% chance you’re going to be grand.
“I’m more of an optimist than anything so I’d stick with any of that.”
You sit down with a surgeon, you look like you’re seeing a ghost. They’re going to list off every worst possibility, and then finish with a bit of good news.
“I was told every possible outcome, and then I was told there’s a much higher chance of success. It finished good… my knowledge of these areas isn’t high enough to start saying, ‘I think I feel good enough to not do it’ or anything like that when it’s such an important thing.
“And nerves have ended careers: Paul O’Donoghue, a friend of mine, he had to finish on a sciatic nerve thing. It was quite close in my mind how serious it could have been. So, I was happy enough to just say to him, ‘listen, your call in doing whatever you say here.’”
Originally published 00.05
