London calling as fit-again Best back from brink

IT’S only six months since Rory Best harboured fears for his career but his incredible rehabilitation will be complete Saturday when he should make only his second start of the season against England in Twickenham.

Last August news emerged that the Ulster hooker would miss nine-to-12 months due to a chronic disc condition in his neck which required surgery.

There is no good time to receive that kind of word but Best had just captained the Irish team on their summer tour to North America and returned from honeymoon so he had farther to fall than most players in that situation.

“The season finished well,” he recalled yesterday. “I had no problems. Just coming back into the pre-season with the loads, the weights and the running, my neck just got stiffer and stiffer. Then one day it just went.

“I was confined to the wooden floor for a week until they came in and gave me a bit of a scan. Then they found this disc was bulging. We gave it plenty of time to reduce but it didn’t. So there was only one option after that.”

The scan eventually showed that the disc had almost prolapsed – slipped out of place to the layman. There was no option but to remove it and fuse the vertebrae. Serious stuff.

The rugby season pulled out of base camp without him but Best wasn’t prepared to write a full campaign off just like that and it turned out that the publicly estimated date of return had been a worst-case-scenario.

“It was always hoped that I could play some rugby before the end of the season. We went through four-weekly reviews and things were going well. I didn’t get any major setbacks.

“It was around November that things went really well for me and I started to do a bit more with the neck. Jonny Davis (Ulster’s strength and conditioning coach) was very good in terms of pushing it within the boundaries he could.

“He pushed it as hard as he could.”

Best made the most of the leave of absence, he was able to build up his size and strength, something that is impossible for players facing games on a weekly basis. It also allowed him a new sense of perspective.

“It hits home that, while I was very lucky to play 90-odd times for Ulster, 30-odd times for Ireland, there’s a realisation that, that might be it.

“It makes you appreciate what you’ve done and what you go through to get there. You try to savour every moment when you come back.”

The suddenness of his return was remarkable, even by the standards of modern medicine, and it came in late January in an AIL Division Three game for his club Banbridge against Barnhall. Not exactly Croke Park but no picnic either.

“With it being my local club, the biggest fear I had was not performing. There was a lot of expectation going back to the club you started playing for. In the back of your mind, you know this is the first proper contact since the surgery but it was probably more the expectation rather than the actual injury itself.”

He needn’t have worried. Banbridge won 17-5 and he moved back up the ladder. Within a week he had put in a stint for the Ireland ‘A’ side against their English counterparts in Bath.

Two cameos off the bench against Italy and France and 69 minutes for Ulster against the Dragons have followed since and his return is all the more welcome given Jerry Flannery’s absence through suspension.

He should be listed at number two when Declan Kidney unveils his starting line-up in Killiney today and a starting berth in London will be the toughest step on his road to fitness.

“Most teams are always physical, England are no different. Every year, having played against them in the ERC and Six Nations, we know each other. So, there is very little room for mistakes. We know what each other is going to do. It comes down to fine detail. You have to empty the tank, you’re drained because it takes so much out of you to beat a side like England in Twickenham.”