The rebuilding of Tommy Bowe

HE’S always been one for making the most of things, Tommy Bowe. A snowball fight in Soldier Field was not quite the kind of competitive action Ireland’s wounded winger had in mind for February 2016. But he still made the most of it.

Bowe, All Black Ryan Crotty and US Eagle Andrew Suniula were ankle deep in the white stuff in Chicago on Tuesday at one of the most storied stadiums in North American sports to announce Ireland’s meeting with the All Blacks there this November. As sharp with a snowball as a rugby ball apparently, Bowe came out on top.

The weekend festival forms part of another major push for the sport stateside, two years after Soldier Field sold out 61,500 seats for the world champions’ first visit here. Bowe admits the All Blacks, and that near mythical first win over them, remains the most gnawing itch he has yet to scratch in his career – “It’s history. That’s what it is”.

But November, Soldier Field, history, all of that…it can wait. For now the most pressing itch is to just get back to doing what he knows best.

Ireland’s dispiriting exit from the World Cup was preceded by Bowe’s own exit, early in the defeat to Argentina when a chop tackle around the knees hit its mark. The Ulsterman was felled and back on all too familiar ground. Posterior cruciate ligament and meniscal damage was the medical speel, out for the guts of the season the translation. Bowe is working hard to eat into that prognosis though.

“It’s going well, really well. I’m back running, back on the pitch, slowly starting to get into some agility stuff and that’s another big step. But it’s still a slow process,” he told the Irish Examiner as he hurried around The Windy City on a promotional blitz. “I mean I had two holes drilled through my fibula and then [holes] drilled through the knee. They had to pull through the ligaments and tie it all up again. It wasn’t ever going to be a quick fix.

“It’s been 16 weeks since surgery now and realistically I probably still have another month and a half. But I’m a hopeful guy, I’m hoping to be back playing rugby for Ulster before the end of the year, get some games in. I’m hoping to be available for selection for the tour to South Africa. That’s the goal.

“This time of year, with the Six Nations on, it’s draining. It drains you having to watch it from outside.”

This draining time is in danger of becoming a spring ritual. Bowe is missing his third Six Nations out of the last four. By the time Ireland wrap up the campaign, he will have missed as many games of the Joe Schmidt era as he has made – 16 of each.

Rebuilding all over again is never easy but he’s better at it now. A more mature Bowe, married last year and with burgeoning business interests in the shape of his clothing and footwear lines, has enough going on outside of the white lines to keep the mind fresh while the body catches back up.

“I do have a lot of things to keep me sane. I’ve been here before too. I’ve been through enough rehabs over the years, I kinda know what I need to be doing. I can almost autopilot parts of it,” he says.

“The first few months are the killer. It is hard mentally. That’s why I went away from it a wee bit. I had my clothes [business], the shoes, sponsorships, I kept myself busy. But now I’m able to turn back to it. I’m back on the pitch, that’s huge. So the focus is back.”

While Bowe was hurriedly whistle-stopping the studios of Chicago’s leading TV and radio stations on Tuesday evening, back across the Atlantic around the same time, Ireland teammate Rob Kearney was also doing the hard sell.

Yet as the winger was busy telling all of Illinois just how exciting a spectacle Ireland would put on come November, the full back was the latest to be put front and centre to defend just how exciting Ireland haven’t been under Joe Schmidt - for some time now.

Just a single try has been snared in the opening fortnight of this Six Nations, where the New Zealander’s side are again defending their title - one which was won with the joint second-lowest try total of the tournament last term. Eight tries were the champions’ lot in 2015, half of them coming on that frantic final day. The Irish offload, apparently wavering somewhere between absent and extinct in Schmidt’s game-plan, has become the stuff of social media meme.

Unsurprisingly, Bowe echoed Kearney’s calls for calm, insisting three games without victory – beginning with the chaotic World Cup quarter-final collapse to Argentina – does not constitute crisis in camp Ireland.

“I think people [inside the squad] are aware of that [criticism]. That we’re not attacking enough or looking to win it enough, that certainly seems to be the popular point now for the pundits – that we need to be showing more attacking rugby,” says Bowe.

“But then we’re back to back Six Nations champions, we won our pool in the World Cup, we go and beat France by a record score. Things are hugely positive up until that Argentina game.

“That game was desperately frustrating for the team, for the supporters, for everyone involved in Irish rugby. It was gutting. You can blame many things but Argentina saved a big huge game for that day and they stuck it to us. We didn’t have enough in the tank to live with them but the world didn’t fall apart in that game.”

The headline offering from Kearney’s defence of the conservative, at times narrow, style employed in the past two weeks against Wales and France was Ireland would be foolish to go wide just because the patrons would like to see the ball come their way. “We don’t have Jonah Lomu out on the wing,” he said.

That’s, well, true. Yet for a four-year period around the turn of the decade, Irish rugby did have its own master marksman, as potent an attacking threat as the sport here had known.

From the start of 2008 to the end of 2012 Tommy Bowe scored 23 tries in 41 Test matches. He scorched earth on good and great days against good and great defences. Giant or minnow, no matter, no one scented the whitewash quite like him. As time and again he poured in, Ireland seemed certain to have a Monaghan man atop its all-time tryscorer list.

And then? Then drought. Since November 2012 Bowe has scored the sum total of four international tries, a number as jarring as any in rugby. Injuries have never been far from the picture in that time, limiting him to just 16 Tests. Yet there is no getting away from the fact that Bowe’s stratospheric 2008-12 strike rate of 56% has plummeted to 25% since. But a week out from his 32nd birthday, as he now shifts towards the autumn of his career, hope springs.

“I’m pretty confident I can come back as the same player,” Bowe says.

“The way sports science has come on, with GPS and training techniques we have, it’s pushed things on to a new level so you’ll know where you’ve to hit to get back to where you were.

“Obviously you look at that time from 2008 to 2012 and I was flying, I was injury-free and it was all a little bit easy, or easier anyway.

“But the way this injury has gone and the rehab has gone so far, I’m hitting PBs in the gym, I’m hitting marks that are great signs.

“That’s the end goal and I focus on that – to be available for selection for South Africa. That would be a great way to finish what’s been a tough enough year.

“I’m confident I’ll be back to where I was - both this year and next year.”

Ireland will play the All Blacks at Soldier Field on November 5 as part of The Rugby Weekend in Chicago. For more details and ticket information see www.therugbyweekend.com.