WHEN PEOPLE TALK about Joey Carbery, the default perspective seems to be ‘what might have been’ and while that’s understandable given what he has been through on the injury front, it glosses over what he has achieved.
Every player dreams of winning a cap for their country. Carbery has 37 of them for Ireland. His debut at the age of 21 was a 20-minute outing off the bench in his country’s first-ever win over New Zealand in 2016, with the Athy man kicking a conversion to help Ireland home in Chicago.
In 2018, he played off the bench in four of Ireland’s Grand Slam games and then started a Test in Australia that summer. He played in the 2019 World Cup, started a Six Nations game away to France in 2022, and featured in all three Tests in that year’s first-ever series win in New Zealand.
In November 2022, he was at number 10 for Ireland against Fiji but his 37th and most recent cap was cut short by a head injury he suffered in a high tackle on him.
Carbery also helped Leinster to their most recent Champions Cup title in 2018, starting twice in the pool campaign as well as featuring in the quarter-final and semi-final, while he played in the province’s Pro14 final success against Glasgow soon after.
Having moved on to Munster in the wake of those successes, Carbery was unlucky to miss their Champions Cup semi-final against Saracens in 2019 through injury, having had an excellent tournament up until that point.
Let’s not forget that he won an All-Ireland League title with Clontarf too.
While more recent years with Munster have been frustrating for Carbery due to injuries, what he’s done in rugby shouldn’t just be discounted for that reason. Sure, he could be in a better position than he is now but there’s no denying his CV is one that many people would dream of putting together.
Having only turned 28 last November and with his latest injury thankfully now behind him, he will be determined to show he still has lots of class. Carbery has half a season left with Munster before he leaves Irish rugby this summer and he will be motivated to go out on a high.
He is heading abroad next season and while a destination hasn’t been officially confirmed at the time of writing, Carbery has been strongly linked with a move to France.
A fresh start seems ideal for Carbery. He’s no longer the first-choice out-half in Munster, with Jack Crowley now the main man, so any contract offer he might have received from the province would have been a big step down on his previous terms. He obviously just wants to start as many games as possible for the remainder of his career too.
And Carbery must be just sick of it all. The scrutiny, the discussion, the opinions, articles like this one. Part of him must yearn to be out of the spotlight he attracts in Irish rugby. That won’t completely go away outside Ireland but he will probably have more anonymity.
Leaving these shores will mean removing himself from the frame for a possible return to the Ireland squad but he hasn’t truly been in that picture for nearly a year now. He did come into the group for a week during the 2023 Six Nations when Johnny Sexton was injured but Carbery wasn’t in the initial wider squad or the World Cup pre-season squad.
You never know, he could play for Ireland again at some stage in the future, but international rugby appears to be off the cards for now.
It’s impossible to ignore the injuries in Carbery’s story. All the way back to a fractured arm in the autumn of 2017, he has seemed to lack luck of any kind.
The worst was the ankle injury he suffered against Italy in the 2019 World Cup warm-ups when he had been playing with great confidence. His World Cup was in severe doubt and even though he ended up travelling, it seemed obvious that he wasn’t right in Japan.
Trying to play through the pain had long-term ramifications for Carbery, who returned to Munster injured, featured just twice in the 2019/20 season and wasn’t seen back in action until February 2021. Later that year, he fractured his elbow and there have been various other injury issues along the way.
Carbery made a promising start to the current season with Munster but was soon cut down by a wrist injury that he’s only just about to return from.
All of this means Carbery has only played for Munster 56 times since joining in 2018. Fullback Mike Haley joined the same summer and would be well past the 100-cap mark by now but for his own current injury.
Carbery’s best performance for Munster is generally agreed to have come away to Gloucester in the Champions Cup in January 2019, which says a lot. It was a majestic performance that mixed his instinctive, exciting skills with what looked like an authoritative leadership of the team in a hammering of the English side.
That’s partly why plenty of Munster fans will wonder ‘what if?’ Of course, Carbery is not faultless in things not kicking on from there but it’s not hard to imagine how all the injuries since have dented his confidence and sense of rhythm as a rugby player.
Go further back in his career and there is another ‘what if?’ moment – Carbery joining Munster in the first place. In 2018, the IRFU’s David Nucifora and Joe Schmidt felt it would be positive for Ireland’s depth if one of the talented young out-halves in Leinster was getting starts in all the big games for another province rather than sitting behind Sexton.
It was suggested to Ross Byrne that he could move to Ulster but he had no interest whatsoever. Carbery, who had been playing lots of rugby at fullback for Leinster, wasn’t interested in going to Ulster either but was convinced to make the switch south to Munster, much to the displeasure of Leinster.
It looked like a good move for Carbery in that first season but then the ankle injury happened in the summer of 2019 and things have been challenging ever since.
Lots of astute rugby people reckon Carbery would have been better to focus on being a fullback all those years ago. He did have some excellent performances at number 15 for Leinster, working well in tandem with Sexton on occasion, but Carbery himself always said he wanted to be a first-choice number 10.
That much hasn’t changed. Carbery is now set for his latest comeback from injury with Munster, hoping his final five months with the province deliver some sort of happy ending. And then it’s onto a completely new chapter.
