Murray frustrated by rumour mill but doesn’t regret injury silence

It was a mystery that had occupied the minds of the Irish rugby community all season. Columns were written about it. Radio chat shows were colonised by it. Hands were wrung over it. And all the while Conor

Murray kept schtum.

How serious was his neck injury? Was it really a neck injury?

How long will he be out? Why isn’t he saying anything about it?

Why won’t he let Munster say anything about it? And what’s with all this ‘protecting your medical data’ stuff about anyway?

It took Murray just seconds to dispel all the doubts and counter all the rumours yesterday. His demeanour as he walked into the room in Dublin’s city centre to promote a PINERGY campaign was

relaxed. Breezy even. A good sign. Then he started to talk. Freely.

“This thing has snowballed, big time,” he began.

Turns out it was a bulging disc in his neck. An injury that kept occurring and sending a sharp pain down his arm and weakening the limb. It flared up again on tour to Australia in the summer but took time to diagnose properly.

That was why the news blackout was imposed.

The only missive on his fitness until this had been a vague one about a neck injury. Then the news blackout kicked in even if he’s been back training with Munster almost two weeks now and the province and the IRFU have been fully aware of his situation at every step of the way.

Heck, he even signed a new contract.

The plan is that he will return to the field with Munster at the back end of November and be up to speed for the back-to-back Euro ties with Castres the following month. It means missing the November internationals, including the All Blacks, but that can’t be helped.

All in all, he was upbeat and open but the news vacuum created over the past few months had already had an unpleasant if predictable effect. All sorts of crazy rumours sprouted up like mushrooms in the darkness and yet Murray has no regrets about how it was handled.

“You can’t control those rumours, what people want to say or make up,” he explained yesterday.

If I had the exact same injury again I would do the exact same thing because it is the type of injury where you don’t know.

“Now it was never my intention to be top secret and not tell you what my injury is. It was, ‘I literally do not know what this is yet’. We wanted to figure it out and, once we knew, we released it that it was my neck and that’s the way it was.

“It wasn’t me against ye (the media) or anything. Certain players have certain opinions about, ‘oh it’s my data, I’m keeping it’. I don’t really have an issue with keeping medical data, unless it was something completely different.

“It was literally just the unknown over when I would be back playing. Yeah, it’s a shame that you hear a lot of rumours and you hear a lot of things back and you think, ‘wow, that couldn’t be further from the truth’.

“I was in a good line of communication with my employer and all that so in the meantime I signed my contract so they were fully up and aware with how I was progressing. None of those rumours could have been true.”

The belief that Murray was drawing a line in the sand on his medical data led inevitably to comparisons with the stand taken previously by Jamie Heaslip who did just that for almost a year before his back injury precipitated his retirement from the game.

Some made the inevitable leap: that the matter was serious enough to be jeopardising Murray’s playing days as well. He admits that mention of Heaslip’s case “was something that worried me a bit” but that pulling on the boots again was always a question of when and not if.

He has missed a decent chunk of rugby but the priority has been, and is, to come back 100% fit. These are exciting times at Munster and with Ireland who face the world champions next month prior to a World Cup in 2019 where they will be expected to make some sort of history.

The squad named by Joe Schmidt yesterday for the November tests – even without Murray – was a reminder of the quality and depth available although the injured scrum-half stopped short of declaring that this is the best Ireland outfit of all time.

You would have to wait and see. You definitely would like to say ‘yes’ but you have to do it over a longer period, definitely.

"Consistency would be the word always hanging over the Irish team from when I started off. We have improved, we have gotten better but, you know, people are bigging up the next 18 months.

“It is a massive period for us. Exciting. The fact that we are up there now and people are waiting to see what is next is hugely exciting and we believe that too. We believe we have another few gears in us too.”