ALL JOKING ASIDE, TO STAKE HIS CLAIM EVANS IS READY ALL OVER AGAIN
ROB Evans is known as a man with a sense of humour – not on a Billy Connolly scale, perhaps, but the Scarlets prop and Wales international is someone who isn’t averse to walking around with a smile on his face. But not so much this season. For months, Evans found himself in anything but jovial spirits as he battled to recover from the jolting effects of concussion.
A head injury picked up in December plunged him into a frightening world of nausea, balance problems and uncertainty.
Anyone who has ever had such an experience will sympathise with the 29-year-old. Not knowing how long it will be before the effects of a brain injury abate can be beyond worrying.
Nor was it the first time Evans had hit such a problem.
In September 2017 he suffered a shuddering head knock against Connacht which affected him so badly he was vomiting blood and feeling close to collapse at random points. He was off rugby for six weeks then.
This time he needed close on 20 weeks to recover.
Can he describe the experience? “The symptoms centred around my balance and feeling quite nauseous,” he says.
“If I did any exercise over a certain level I felt like I was going to collapse, which isn’t nice, and then you build yourself back up to a certain level and it comes over you again.
“The hardest bit is probably the frustration.
“The thing with concussion is there’s no time frame for when you are going to be back.
“I was hoping to be involved in the Six Nations and that was my first aim and then you’re chasing that. It’s just frustrating, really, but at the end of the day you have to take your time and, to be fair, people reminded me ‘you have got only one head’.
“So I took my time.
“It was different from my other concussion.
“Last time I had bad headaches but this time I would have headaches now and again but it was more like balance issues and that sick feeling. You are a little bit anxious as well because you don’t know if or when you are going to be back.”
After a bumpy 18 months or so, Evans had actually been looking more like his old self on the field before the injury.
In the Scarlets’ Heineken Champions Cup win over Bath in December he was outstanding. “I was coming back from a neck injury and feeling brilliant, like I was hitting a bit of form, but then I just picked up the concussion and it knocked me for six,” he says.
“I hoped it wasn’t going to be as long as it has been but it did take a bit of wind out of my sails and took time to come back from.
“Credit to all who helped me because I am feeling a lot better now and its brilliant to be back out there.”
Evans will hope his medical issues of recent years are firmly behind him. He had a shoulder injury that caused him a lot of grief before a neck problem sustained with Wales during a World Cup training camp in Switzerland meant he couldn’t undertake contact training while out there, ultimately costing him a place at the 2019 global tournament.
It was a shattering blow to a player who had previously been on a sharp upward trajectory, backing up solid scrummaging with excellent work around the field.
During the autumn of 2017, he looked to be on his way to joining the ranks of the very best.
In February 2018, Rugby World magazine named him at No. 89 in a list of the planet’s top 100 players, saying: “The larger-than-life Evans is solid at the set-piece and regularly in
double figures for his tackle count, but it’s in the loose, where he is comfortable with ball in hand, that he warrants covetous glances.
“A PRO14 champion, the loosehead was arguably Wales’s best player last autumn.”
His good form extended all the way through Wales’s 2019 Grand Slam campaign, when he started four games.
But missing the World Cup later that year hit him hard, with Warren Gatland leaving him out amid the Pembrokeshire product’s injury problems of the previous months.
In a podcast with the BBC’s Scrum V last November, Evans said: “I was hugely disappointed at the time. “It probably knocked me.
“I saw Gats after Wales’s game with the Barbarians after the World Cup. He said it (missing the tournament) would be the best thing that ever happened to me.
“At the time, I was thinking: ‘Hang on, nah. How can this be? I’d worked so hard for four years to go to the World Cup. You have that disappointment and then you have to look your dad in the eye and say: ‘I didn’t get picked.’
“It’s tough.”
Evans conceded that Gatland may have been right, though, stressing that he was feeling better than ever and had corrected “little habits that weren’t good enough”.
Then came his concussion.
But he’s back on the field now and his performance against the Ospreys was encouraging, with the Scarlet busy throughout. It was a significant step in the right direction for a man who must have wondered at various points over the past couple of years what he’d done to displease the gods who dish out good fortune.
“It’s just great to be back,” he says. “I’m loving playing again, being back into the routine of game weeks which is a lot simpler than trying to work out when you’re going to be back fit.”
He’s returned at a turbulent time for the Scarlets, with head coach Glenn Delaney having departed.
Results before the Ospreys game may have gone a shade haywire, but Delaney, an all-round energiser and beacon of positivity, was popular with Scarlets players.
“Rugby’s a tough sport on and off the field sometimes,” says Evans.
“It was obviously a bit strange after the match with Glenn leaving but that’s the game we’re in unfortunately. It was sad to see him go, but you have to try to get back on track because things don’t stop.
“Yeah, its been tough but you don’t have too much time to think about that. Dai Flanagan has done a great job taking the reins and everyone’s behind him with the senior players stepping up.”
Will the Wales Tests this summer come too soon for Evans? “First and foremost I have just returned from my injury, so I’m trying to get back to a bit of form,” he says.
“So that type of stuff is out of my hands.
“But obviously it’s an ambition. It’s always an ambition to play for Wales and at the highest level.
“All I can do is perform for the Scarlets and do my best for them, which is what I want to do. That’s the most important thing for me right now and whatever happens, happens.”
Many will be pleased to see Evans back.
He once said: “I come across as a joker but I’m serious when I need to be.”
These past few months he has spent a long time being serious.
Hopefully, his problems are behind him.