A tonic for the troops

NIGEL MELVILLE might have known the afternoon was going to be different when he heard the Latin.

Before Gloucester took on Munster in Thomond Park last January they were welcomed by Branch president, Dr Len Harty, quoting the Roman historian Sallust ("Faber est suae quisque fortunae", for the record).

Formerly the team doctor, Harty had to give up looking after the players when he reached the administrative pinnacle, but as medic he spanned the amateur and professional eras. He's seen the frequent use of "house full" signs outside Thomond and Musgrave Parks taking over from the couple of hundred hardy souls at the interprovincials. The latter attendances were the norm when Harty began tending to the team's medical needs, but his debut was pretty classy. His first game as Munster team doctor was the win over the touring Australians, World Cup champions, in 1992, angry Bob Dwyer, Garrick Morgan and all .

Before that Harty had played for UCC, Garryowen and Sundays Well, dipping a toe in coaching when he retired. He and Dr Mick Molloy led UCC to the Munster Senior League in 1984 but medical responsibilities had always coexisted with the training drills.

"Once you graduate you're always looking after injuries anyway, and often you might be the only doctor at a match so you'd be called in to stitch someone," he admits.

Sometimes that can backfire: Harty recalls one Sundays Well game in which a player asked a doctor to repair a dislocated finger, only to be told he was speaking to a psychiatrist.

The Munster connection came from covering the province's Cork training sessions as a favour to the then doctor, Morgan Costello of Garryowen.

"In those days it was a lot easier," says Harty. "You had only three games a year, plus the odd touring team. In addition, the players trained at night because they were amateurs so it wasn't too bad. When they became semi-professional they started training more by day and I couldn't make those sessions. They got a physiotherapist to cover those, and I'd be on call."

The advent of professionalism means more games, more high-impact collisions with bigger and stronger players.

Is it stating the obvious to suggest there's more physical damage?

"It's compensated for by the fact that they're trained more intensively. It's a different category of body to that of the amateur sportsman and they're conditioned for high impact. You're probably getting more ligament damage to knees and so on, which would be a more traditional soccer injury, because of the speed of impact.

The same applies for shoulder injuries."

There's also something of a change in lifestyle, naturally, compared to the amateur days, when a player worked a full day and then ran his guts out twice a week in training.

"Now they train twice a day, they swim to recover, it's weights one day and contact another, they don't drink apart from special occasions, while their food is monitored and they're told what and when to eat."

When it comes to food, the Munster squad members, like high performance participants in team sports all over the world, are very familiar with one humble fowl: "Yes, they'd be fairly sick of chicken alright," Dr Harty grins.

The rest and recovery afforded them is another huge advantage for the professional sportsperson, Harty points out, and, warming to his theme, he offers a concrete example in the famous ice baths, and the fairly morbid reasoning behind them.

"It's well known that if someone drowns in a warm lake they've drowned, while if it happens in a cold lake they can recover up to 40 minutes after immersion. The cold slows down the body metabolism which makes a recovery possible. After a high-impact game, if you freeze the muscles chill them the amount of acid that builds up is reduced considerably, so recovery is faster."

The team doctor operates at the sharp end of on-field combat as well as involving himself in the long processes of preparation; medics in many sporting codes will identify with Harty's pointing out that after collisions and tackles he waits for players to get up and move off before monitoring the progress of the action, which may have moved on considerably.

Diagnosis of injuries, when they occur, must be fast but not hasty: "You have to be quick to spot if an injury is serious or not and make a decision. The player always wants to stay on but as doctor it's a serious decision an injury could lead to long-term damage to a career whereas if you hold them back for a week or two they could be perfect."

Harty's evaluation of the team doctor's philosophy is enlightening: "You're obliged to make a decision for the person, not the team. There are some coaches who would want you to put the team before the player but that's never happened in Munster. In fairness to all the coaches I've dealt with, the likes of Garret Fitzgerald, Jerry Holland, Declan Kidney and Alan Gaffney, none of them would push you. If you say the player isn't well, they accept that. Other coaches might put pressure on you, and that's difficult, but we're fortunate that the attitude here is good."

So is the craic. Harty tells of the senior Irish international who asked for a sleeping tablet before a big game against French opposition. A considerate team-mate inserted said pill in the international's evening sandwich, which meant bedtime came several hours early.

Seasoned Munster fans pondering the apparent competitiveness between members of the support staff in hurrying out to injured players were not imagining things either; Harty usually challenged the team physio to a footrace once a game.

The Branch president is circumspect, naturally, about this weekend's game, pointing out the considerable power in the Stade Francais team while remaining confident in his own side's ability. That's no surprise, given his quotation from Sallust.

The translation? Every man is the architect of his own fortune.