'Soul-sapping' injury woe allowed Ryan Baird find himself outside rugby
Ryan Baird during an Ireland men's rugby captain's run at the Aviva Stadium. Pic: David Fitzgerald/Sportsfile
Frustrating? Ryan Baird lets those 11 letters roam around inside his head for a little bit and decides they don’t come close to describing how it felt to return from a broken leg and then suffer the same injury in no time at all.
“Interesting word. It wasn't frustrating. It was more than that. It was soul-sapping.”
The first break happened playing for Ireland against South Africa this time last year. Andy Farrell said later that the forward had played on after suffering it, but he didn’t realise the extent of the problem in the moment. It felt at first like just a severely bad leg.
The physio, thinking the same, strapped him up but reality eventually bit.
“Tadhg Beirne just goes – you’re going to have to blur this one - ‘Get the fuck off the pitch if you can't run,’ because I couldn't. I couldn't walk. But I did a scrum, and then I tried to run around the corner.
“Then they were bringing on Josh [van der Flier], or Josh was going off for someone else, and I was like, ‘guys, I actually can't continue’. So they took me off. I got the X-ray in the stadium and actually couldn't believe it was broken.”
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It was a cruel turn for a man whose potential had been curbed too often before by injuries, but he was in a good place mentally by the time he made it back in the spring for Champions Cup ties against Edinburgh and Sale.
He had plans. Get back. Finish the club season out with Leinster. Have a good summer tour to Australia and New Zealand. Then it happened again against the PREM side and the blow was so much tougher to take that time around.
“It just sucked the life out of me, that second injury.” No surprise. Not just because of the repeat nature of it so soon after the first setback, but for the fact that the recovery second time around was so complicated. The plate inserted to help the healing never settled. Comeback dates came and went. Plans sundered.
He couldn’t make the next step, literally. Couldn’t walk, couldn’t run. In the end, the decision was made to remove the plate and it was the back end of September, when Leinster were playing the Lions in South Africa, before he made it back to the field.
“So I just kept getting the rug pulled out from underneath me, and that was just was sapping the life out of me. On the flip side then it gives you that time and the realisation that rugby can be taken away from you quite quickly, and that sense of purpose can…
“It can make you feel quite alone and quite isolated. So it was a great time to really reflect on who I am outside of being a rugby player, and acknowledging that rugby is only one part. That was a real positive that I took out of the injuries.”
Baird has taken time to reflect before. He rented a camper van and took his dog Mackenzie on a golf and fishing trip along Ireland’s north coast three years ago after the disappointment of being left out of the squad for the Scotland and New Zealand World Cup games in France.
Rehab took up more of his time the last year than people would realise but he did use the pause in play to indulge in his hobbies and a love for cooking. Some of his recipes have been shared online. He put a mackerel fishing video up this week, but work is work.
The emotion of putting on a green jersey for the first time in a year, against Argentina last week, took him close to tears during the anthem and there was a touch of anxiety about it too given the stakes. He is proud how he handled that, divorced it from the performance.
Perspective can help in all this. Baird found as much one morning during the current camp with the Ireland squad when he opened up the door of the team hotel and found himself taking in the breathtaking woodlands around him.
“I was just realising that it's all okay, you know? And the world's not ending. If you do feel a little bit of anxiety, it’s just an opportunity to go out and express yourself and have fun, do something that you enjoy doing.”
It feels like this is his time.
Farrell spoke, unsolicited, about how the world could be his oyster after naming the team to face the Pumas last week. He lived up to that with a superb performance highlighted by a destructive input on the opposition’s lineout throw.
Baird was quick to shrug off the head coach’s praise. "Sure the world is everyone's oyster, isn't it?” And he will tell you nothing has really changed with him physically in the last four or five years. If his form owes to anything, he says, it’s his curiosity.
“Yeah, maybe the curiosity. Just the evolution of who I am as a person, probably as a by-product, has probably allowed me to be a bit freer on the pitch and that's something that will always be there for everyone.”
It’s a curiosity that makes him look intently at someone like Tadhg Beirne, his captain against Fiji today, and wonder at the sense of calm and the intelligence that the Munster man brings to the field, and how he sees the game even in the midst of the maelstrom.
Baird looks happy in the eye of that storm too. There was a time when galloping breakaways were his trademark. He is happiest now setting up for defensive a lineout, looking at his teammates around him and knowing they’re about to cause the opposition some problems.
“Yeah,” he smiles, “I get a great kick out of that.”
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