Shields ready to flourish with Wasps after sickly England start
The back-row wants to bounce back from his summer tour illness, he tells Daniel Schofield ‘It was pretty bad. It was the worst I have been sick in my life – this was about 10 days’
It is no wonder that Brad Shields’s memories of his first England tour are a bit of a blur. Even before he flew out to South Africa this summer, the New Zealand-born back-row found himself at the centre of a fierce eligibility row. Then, just a few days after meeting his new team-mates, he came off the bench to make his England debut in Johannesburg. He went on to start the second Test against the Springboks, only to pick up a sickness bug that resulted him being admitted to hospital and shedding more than a stone.
Even now, Shields has not yet recovered all of that lost weight, but he will make his English club rugby debut tomorrow for Wasps against Exeter Chiefs at the Ricoh Arena. His fellow new boy, Lima Sopoaga, is likely to make his Wasps debut off the bench, having arrived in Coventry a week later.
For his troubles, Shields also picked up a few stitches above his left eyebrow after a trainingground collision with Ambrose Curtis, while the culprit of his illness is suspected to be a rogue chicken sandwich that he consumed with his parents. “It looked pretty good to me – I made sure I checked it – but then it went from there,” Shields said. “It was pretty bad. It was the worst I have been sick in my life. Usually it lasts for a couple of days but this was about 10 days by the time I got back to New Zealand, started putting some weight back on and started to feel normal again.
“I lost about seven or eight kilos during the time I was ill – mainly in fluid. Although I didn’t think I was too bad, they took me to hospital and put me on a drip once they realised how much I’d lost. It took a wee while to bounce back. I’m still sort of bouncing back from that now I guess, putting on all that weight, but I’m feeling pretty good.”
In spite of that experience and losing both Test matches that he played in, Shields still looks back fondly upon his first involvement as an England player. “I was lucky enough to get a game and a half and the rest is history with that last week,” Shields said. “I had such an amazing time and it was such an honour to represent the country and play international football, which was cool.
“Coming into a team with only a week to train before a Test is pretty unusual. The thing which stuck out for me was the amount of work everyone else put in to help me out and get me ready for that first Test. When I showed up on the Monday, the amount of people that came up to welcome me was unreal.
“The next test is how I bounce back from the illness and go again. I’ve obviously been playing good rugby in Super Rugby, but now I have to make sure I’m at the top of my game over here. The thing about Test rugby is that if you slip off a little bit, there’s always someone else who will take your place. I just want to get out there and play as well as I can, then the rest is out of my control.”
At least, the furore over the initial call-up of Shields, which involved New Zealand Rugby Union chief executive Steve Tew, his Rugby Football counterpart Steve Brown and World Rugby vice-chairman Agustin Pichot, has died down. Both his parents, Nigel and Danielle, are English-born and currently manage an estate just outside Reading. Having moved to Leamington Spa, Shields is slowly adapting to British foibles such as Sunday opening hours.
What is not in doubt is the talent that Wasps now have on their hands in Shields, who captained the Hurricanes and made 100 appearances in Super Rugby. At the Premiership Rugby launch, Northampton director of rugby Chris Boyd, Shields’s former coach at the Hurricanes, told Dai Young that he was one of best players he had ever coached.
Unlike Eddie Jones, Young, the Wasps director of rugby, will not consider selecting Shields in the second row but cautioned that it typically takes southernhemisphere imports at least a year to adapt to the demands of the Premiership. Yet Shields has no intention of dipping his toe in the water of English rugby.
“I’m just trying to build that respect and slowly build into the team,” Shields said. “But obviously a game is going to be different, obviously I am going to go completely balls out, just as normal.”