Getting used to tough breaks
“I’M NOT from a rugby background,” says Dr Eanna Falvey, a native of Christy Ring’s home village of Cloyne.
“A bad rugby player would be one of the worst things I could have been in this job, but I can say to the lads, ‘I don’t know anything about rugby, but your arm is such-and-such and you need to do this’.”
‘This job’ is team doctor to the Irish rugby team. An Irish super-heavyweight boxing champion – hence the Haye connection (“play that down,” he pleaded) – Falvey tore the cartilage in his knee early in medical school and four subsequent knee operations turned him towards sports medicine.
Former Irish rugby international Dr Mick Molloy, doyen of Irish sports medics, helped him along the way – “He made it happen for me” is how Falvey puts it. He worked with Munster for four seasons prior to going to Australia in 2007, and after completing his training there, the Cork man returned to Ireland.
It’s not his full-time job. He gives the IRFU 16 weeks a year with the blessing of the Sports Surgery Clinic in Santry, where he’s director of sports and exercise medicine, and he also specialises in sports and exercise medicine at the Consultants Private Clinic at Cork University Hospital.
“With the rugby team, you’re combining your passions, sports and medicine. At a training session watching the lads throwing the ball around and you say to yourself, ‘this is awesome’.”
There’s not a lot of time for musing on how awesome the sessions are, mind. It’s work, and there literally isn’t a minute to spare.
“Everything is about load – minutes on the pitch multiplied by the player’s rate of perceived exertion,” says Falvey. “If you do a 75-minute session at a perceived rate of exertion of 5, that’ll give you 375 units, every single session or activity counts toward the load for the week.
“It’s a crude way of keeping an eye on things, a ball park standard figure but it helps to plan the week’s work in training. We have GPS devices to work out the heart rates and distances covered, but the load helps with planning sessions. There’s only x amount of load allowed per session, so every minute is fought for, literally.”
For all the science, the players’ tolerance is still key. “It comes back to asking a guy how hard he felt a session was, and to him saying that felt like a seven out of 10, or whatever,” he says. “Now, what you’d call a six I might call a four, but so long as we’re consistent it’s fine.
“So it’s about the management team working as a team. The medics and physiotherapists are looking after injuries, but if the strength and conditioning guys don’t get it right you’ll see a rash of overuse injuries such as hamstring injuries, so they want their time.
“At times you’d feel sorry for the coaches. They’ll get a shellacking if a defensive move or a scrum breaks down but they may have had only 45 minutes to work on that during the week. There’s very little time. The old way might have been, ‘we’re not coming off the field until we get this right’, and you’d keep players on the field for two hours. Then they’re exhausted, two of them pull hamstrings the next day and they can’t play at the weekend.
“There’s a trade-off between having guys fit, physically able to get on the field, and having lads able to play as a team. Ideally for the coach he’d have them playing as a team, but that may mean excessive time on the paddock significantly raising the risk of injuries. It’s a delicate trade-off, and the ability to be a good management team depends on your ability to get that balance right.
“The sessions are timed to the minute, literally. They have to be. If a couple of sessions run over by a few minutes, by the end of the week the players may have done an extra half an hour on the field, they’re not as fresh for the game, and if they lose, questions are asked.”
During tomorrow’s game at Murrayfield, Falvey is one of those track-suited figures you see sprinting on occasionally with the first aid bag. IRB protocols mean team medics decide for themselves if they’re needed.
“Every time someone goes down it’s a potentially dangerous situation. The IRB allow you to have a medic on each side of the pitch, so I’m on one side and Cameron Steele is on the other, and if you see someone you feel needs attention you go on the pitch.
“There’s a lot of back-up at an international game. There’s an anaesthetist in the stands, a maxillofacial surgeon, an orthopaedic surgeon, an emergency physician, physiotherapists, paramedics, an ambulance – and if I go off with a player into the changing rooms, there’ll be a second team doctor there to cover me and look after their injury, so you’re very well supported.
“The higher you go in the game the higher the risk, but the better the medical protection as well. In one of the games a player broke his nose early in the game and he was x-rayed before half-time – hats off to Conor McCarthy (IRFU medical director) for his work on that.”
WORKING in Australia showed Falvey a country which takes sports injuries seriously. “Every Monday in The Age newspaper there’d be 10 pages on the AFL games – and one page of that would be on injuries.
“What’s happened to a guy, when he’s expected back . . . well-known medics like Peter Larkins and Peter Bruckner will be on television showing where the injuries in question are. When I was there a punter came into me one day, a normal guy, and I asked him how he was. ‘Ah, struggling with OP’. Osteitis pubis – he even had the abbreviation, not the full term for the injury.
“Now, that’s a good thing in one sense. The more the public knows about injury, the more educated they are, and a lad playing junior football might think, ‘well, maybe I should go and have this seen to’.
“But at the same time, when it comes to high-profile injuries that people discuss, it’s a little like guessing what goes on between a player and a coach – only they will ever really know.”
Falvey knows them better than most. He’s had to change his perspective since swapping Munster red for Ireland green, but his respect for the players is constant.
“It’s funny, I worked with Munster and you were watching Heineken Cup games: that was the priority, the win or the bonus point, but with Ireland you watch Heineken Cup games hoping lads don’t get injured.
“The way the season is stacked – two Heineken Cup games, autumn internationals, two more Heineken Cup games. Christmas break, Heineken Cup, Six Nations – you have lads playing for two teams. They want to win all those games and you can’t coast. The day you mind yourself is the day you get hurt. By their nature, those players are winners and want to play every game and they can sometimes be their own worst enemies.
“They all play with a certain amount of pain, they’d be waiting a long time to be pain-free for a game. They’re very tough men.”
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