Wing Morgan targets return after suffering ‘unfortunate injury’
OSPREYS wing Luke Morgan has revealed the full extent of the injury that has placed him off limits at an important point of the season.
A medical bulletin from his region indicated just over three weeks ago that Morgan had suffered a “significant impact to his lower back” in the Guinness PRO14 game against Benetton on October 12.
And the player himself has now shed further light on the problem by reporting that he suffered three vertebrae fractures in the encounter with the Italians.
“It was an unfortunate injury the other week,” Morgan told Premier Sports TV, with the Ospreys starting their European Champions Cup campaigns with a home fixture against Munster on Saturday.
“I fractured my vertebrae in three places.
“It sounds worse than it is. “Hopefully, I’ll be back in a few weeks.”
The official line from the Ospreys in their update on October 21 was that Morgan would be out for six weeks, meaning they will continue to be stretched for cover out wide, with Keelan Giles sidelined for the rest of the season with a knee injury and George North in recovery mode after the World Cup.
They will be counting the days to Morgan’s return, then.
This time a year ago, the Bridgend-born flyer won a Wales cap after starting the campaign with a burst of four touchdowns in five games, some of those scores coming via quite startling finishes.
Unfortunately, he saw little ball in the autumn series opener against Scotland and didn’t feature in any of the other November Tests.
But Wales’ all-time record try scorer in sevens responded by returning to the regional game and scoring a hat-trick against Zebre, in the process sending a message to the national set-up.
It didn’t succeed in earning him a Six Nations place, mind, but had the X-factor wing stayed fit this autumn he would have hoped to impress the new national coaching regime headed by Wayne Pivac.
Now Morgan is just going to have to focus on returning from his injury, playing well for the Ospreys and seeing if he can do enough to impress Pivac ahead of the Six Nations.
Whatever, he is the kind of player Ospreys backs coach Matt Sherratt will feel he can get plenty out of.
The man who put such a sheen on the Blues’ back division is on record as expressing admiration for the 27-year-old, saying after Morgan had suffered his rejection by Wales: “Luke went from not playing a 15-a-side game in two or three years and within a couple of months he is playing for Wales at the Principality Stadium in front of 70,000-odd people.
“Unfortunately, he was never going to keep on that trajectory.
“There were always going to be ups and downs and his graph has probably levelled out a bit now. Really, that was always going to happen.
“The good thing about Luke is that he hasn’t become bogged down with the tactical side of 15s. His instinct as a sevens player is still there.
“I have seen before with players, sometimes they come to 15s and you try and change them as characters and they start worrying about all the technicalities and the shape of the game and they forget about what they are good at.
“Luke is a breath of fresh air in terms of going out and wanting to beat people. So I regularly remind him: just view the game like sevens. If you get the ball and try to beat the first man whatever happens after that is a bonus.
“He has to work on his aerial stuff and back-field play and things like that, but he is still a real threat with the ball.”