I’VE HAD TO REBUILD MYSELF FROM SCRATCH... I was in a dark place
Trinder reveals injury despair as he fought to resurrect his career
HENRY TRINDER is talking through the various rebuilding projects in his life. The first is a five-bedroom ‘doer-upper’ on the outskirts of Gloucester. Most of the internal walls have been knocked down, a new roof has been installed and an extension is being built out the back.
Six months in and the upstairs windows have just been fitted, with the finishing touches applied by a workman wearing the jersey of local rivals, Bath.
‘He’s not been able to give me too much stick recently,’ says Trinder with a laugh, picking out said workman at the top of the scaffolding.
The second rebuilding project has been his rugby career, which almost came to a premature end through injury. When Trinder suffered a second ACL injury to his knee in 2016, his party trick was to grab his shin and bend his leg inwards at a 45-degree angle from the joint.
Now Gloucester are two places above Bath in the Premiership and the centre is pushing for a recall to the England squad.
‘My knee bent in directions that a knee shouldn’t bend because all the ligaments had gone,’ says the 28year-old, drawing his finger across the scars on his right leg.
‘My hamstring fired up my leg. My IT band fired up my leg. They came clean off the bone. In the end, they soldered off my patella tendon, pulled it out, put it back together and put it back in. I wasn’t allowed to tense my leg because it would rip the origins back off the bone. I had to sit with a machine that would literally just bend my leg up and down. Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Down.’
The injury took its toll on Trinder’s family. He relied heavily on his American wife, Ryann, who he met in Las Vegas, and adopted two French bulldogs to keep him company. Medical bills accumulated for previous knee, shoulder, hamstring, jaw, ankle and groin injuries — and there were doubts whether Gloucester would offer him a new contract.
‘I had to start again from right down at the very bottom,’ he says. ‘It’s a lonely place.
‘A few days after my second knee op I started a diary. I found it when we were packing up the old house and the first couple of pages are dark. It’s all dated and it’s scary to read it back and to see those days when I asked myself, “Do I really want to do this again? Is this really all worth it?”
‘ There were sleepless nights... Are you going to fall off a cliff into some abyss? Now I can look back at those pages and put things into perspective. It’s a stupid job, really, but I wouldn’t keep coming back a fifth, sixth, seventh time if I didn’t love it. It’s all worth it when you step out at Kingsholm.’
There is an ambition to step out at Tw i c k e n h a m , although the 28year- old centre is wary of getting ahead of himself. Gloucester coach Johan Ackermann has backed his star with the ‘X factor’ to be given a chance on Eng- land’s summer tour of South Africa, after previous call-ups by Stuart Lancaster were cut short. Footwork, offloading and defensive strength are all in Trinder’s armoury, with Sir Clive Woodward and Brian O’Driscoll heaping praise on to the No 13, who has been tipped for stardom since 2007. ‘ It was always, “That Henry Trinder; he could’ve been good, he had potential”,’ he says. ‘ It annoyed me for a long time and it still does now. I don’t want to be remembered as that guy: the nearly guy. I want to walk away from this game on two feet and be able to say that I gave it everything. I want to finish on my terms, not on injury’s terms, so there’s still unfinished business. ‘ I want to play for my country. I want to get back to that standard I was viewed at. Saying that, I’ve not heard anything from Eddie Jones and I’m not sure if I will in future. Of course, I’d love to play at a World Cup but there’s no carrot there at the minute, so all of my focus is on Gloucester.’
Spirits are high at the club. With their ‘doer-upper’ still uninhabitable, the Trinders have been lodging with team-mate Tom Savage.
‘ Personally, I’ve not enjoyed rugby this much since 2013,’ says Trinder, who faces Exeter today. ‘The clubs finishing ninth generally don’t have players getting picked for England. We want to be first. If international things come off the back of that, then it would be a dream come true.’
There is also the American dream. Trinder and Ryann married in Las Vegas in 2015 and, one day, the plan is to relocate to his wife’s home city of Chicago. ‘I’d like to coach in the American league at some point,’ he says. ‘Maybe even pull on my boots out there one day, you never know.
‘But for now, it’s all about repaying Gloucester’s faith. It’s about building something special.’