After full MOT, Sam rock and looks ahead
TO use his own words, Sam Warburton spent six months living under a rock after the Lions tour, away from the media glare and the public spotlight.
He also used that time to undergo what he calls “a full MOT”, having operations to rectify long-standing neck and knee problems, ruling him out of action for this season.
Now he has given his first interview since September to rugby correspondent SIMON THOMAS, where he reveals just how battered his body had become and how tough that was to cope with mentally.
He talks about how he believes the surgery will extend his career, gives his thoughts on Wales’ Six Nations campaign to date and his new role as a TV pundit,
And the two-times Lions skipper also reflects on his decade in the game as a professional as he prepares to embark on his testimonial year with Cardiff Blues... Q: You will be launching your testimonial year in April. Can you believe it’s a decade since you started out with the Blues? A: No, it just feels like it’s flown by. It only seems like yesterday I was starting out as a professional. In my first game, I dislocated my shoulder after 15 minutes, so start as you mean to go on!
I can’t believe it’s been ten years. When I was a young player here, the idea of knocking on the door of 30 seemed an absolute age away. You think you have got so much time, but it’s scary how fast ten years have gone.
A testimonial is something I didn’t think would happen until I finished playing. But then I suddenly realised this is actually my tenth year.
I was a little bit reluctant to have a testimonial, because I felt too young. But I was asking ex-players like Martyn Williams, Jamie Robinson and Rhys Williams who had them with the Blues and Rhys said he was 29 when he had his, so do it. I didn’t feel so bad about going ahead with it then.
Hywel Peterson agreed to be my testimonial chairman and the Blues and the WRU granted permission, so I am very grateful to them. Q: You are out of action for this season having undergone neck and knee surgery following the Lions tour. How was that decision reached? A: Ideally, I was going to come back from the Lions and carry on playing. The boys on NDCs had eight weeks off after the tour, so I gave myself four weeks completely off. Then Jonathan Davies and me were training partners at the Union for the second four week block. We were meant to be off, but we wanted to do our own stuff. So we did a lot of running and weights, all the conditioning stuff you need to get back.
Then I went back to the Blues and, in my first rugby session, the neck went again. Q: When you say the neck went, what exactly does that mean? What does it feel like? A: People call it a stinger, but that doesn’t do it justice at all. When you have a stinger, you have a whack on the neck and you have a little bit of a tingling sensation down your arm and after about 10 seconds it goes away.
Since 2012, I have been having nerve problems with my left arm, which have different kind of symptoms. When I have an impact on the neck, the disc pinches the nerve which supplies the arm, so your arm just goes. The only way I can explain it is like when you bite ice cream on a tooth and it’s super-sensitive. It’s like that down your whole arm and fingers and it’s really intense for about two minutes and I couldn’t do anything. Sometimes it lasted longer than that.
Normally you get it from a big collision, but I was getting them from doing lineouts, from getting nudged or just from looking over my shoulder really quickly because I was pinching that nerve.
Over five years it just gradually deteriorated more and more and more to the point where I couldn’t do contact and I didn’t want to tackle anyone anymore. That’s how bad the nerves got. I just didn’t have the confidence to take contact.
I was getting burning sensations down my neck when I was driving. I knew it wasn’t right what was going on in my neck.
The last 12 months, I have really been having to manage it. Every training day, I was in having some form of treatment on it.
I knew I had to get it sorted and nip it in the bud rather than just keep plugging along at 70 per cent.
We had scans, I saw a specialist and he said the obvious thing to do was to get it operated on.
They shaved off a little bit of bone from the bottom of one vertebrae and the top of another, to increase the space between them to help the nerve come out, just so it doesn’t get pinched.
I had to sign a form beforehand