Fresh injury blow for Joey Carbery as Munster 10 suffers elbow fracture

It’s a major blow, first and foremost for a player who has endured a tormenting time with injury since just prior to the 2019 Rugby World Cup

Munster's Joey Carbery receives medical attention against Wasps. Picture: INPHO/Dan Sheridan

Keith Earls’ personal journey couldn’t help but command the attention when his autobiography was released earlier this season but the Munster winger had plenty of interest to say about rugby while he was at it.

His comments on the frequency with which Munster have seen coaches come and go, and the effect that all this has had on the team’s ambitions, are all the more apposite now that Johann van Graan has joined Stephen Larkham in confirming his departure.

This brain drain hasn’t been the only destabilising factor in the province’s efforts to end a trophy drought that stretches all the way back to 2011. Another contributing problem has been the injury problems that have afflicted so many of their out-halves.

Tyler Bleyendaal and Johnny Holland have both been forced into retirement this last six years, Bill Johnston’s early promise at 10 was curbed time and again by fitness problems, and now Joey Carbery is facing yet another spell on the sidelines.

That’s a cruel run of luck — most obviously for the players concerned — and Carbery will now find himself back on the treatment table, post-surgery, 10 months and 14 games into his return from a 13-month spell of torment with ankle and wrist issues.

“Getting back into rugby has been a lot harder than getting over the injury because you’re out for so long,” he said after a cameo against New Zealand last month. “If you don’t do something you get a bit rusty, and I’ve felt like it has taken me a while to get back into it.

“You can do as much video as you want and watch training, but until you actually do it and get back out there, it’s a different ball game. That’s been the hardest thing really, getting back into the swing of things.”

It wasn’t all a grind since he made that reappearance against Cardiff in February. There was for instance a man-of-the-match effort in atrocious conditions when Scarlets came to Thomond Park the following month, but Wasps last Sunday was the truest sign yet of a rebirth.

No timescale has been announced yet for his latest bout of rehab but six weeks is a likely healing time and there is bound to be work required in getting up to speed again beyond that. Ireland, by the by, start their Six Nations campaign in less than two months.

The more immediate consequence to all this is for a Munster side that, after their recent experiences with Covid-related complications, has at least become accustomed to rolling with the punches that come with a pandemic.

Youth prospered in Coventry last weekend and, with Carbery out of the picture for the foreseeable, it will fall to a stable of young and inexperienced out-halves to step up another rung or two on the roster, as the case demands, and with the same aplomb.

Ben Healy is the most experienced, and oldest of them with 22 candles on his last birthday cake and 24 senior appearances to date for the province. Only two of them have come in the more rarified surrounds of European competition.

As for Jack Crowley and Jake Flannery, both are 21 and have less than 10 caps between them, but the former carries especially high expectations, with Ronan O’Gara revealing some time back that he would like to have had him at La Rochelle for a spell.

It’s another French opponent on the agenda this coming week with Castres visiting Thomond Park on the back of a fiercely contested 20-18 defeat to Harlequins last weekend. That was their first at Stade Pierre Fabre this term.

They are nought for seven in Limerick, however. Another win is well within Munster’s compass, but all three of Carbery’s understudies were part of the squad for the aborted trip to South Africa and it remains to be seen who will be available come 8pm on Saturday night.

Chris Farrell, John Hodnett, Roman Salanoa, and academy player Jonathan Wren all came through the win away to Wasps on their return from injury issues, while the initial 34-strong travelling party that returned from South Africa has completed its quarantine period.

The latter party of 14 is continuing its additional period of self-isolation since its subsequent return from Cape Town.