MUNSTER FANS HAD to wait six months between Conor Murray appearances in red. But rest assured, it was time well spent.
His Thomond Park comeback game on Sunday, his third appearance since returning from a neck injury, was not perfect. Yet in many ways, the feisty duel he was drawn into by opposite number Ludovic Radosavljevic was just what the doctor ordered.
Rugby is a collision sport. And as a physically imposing scrum-half, one who is targeted as a key man by opponents, Murray can never expect to get through a match untouched.
Murray gets past Lassalle. Source: Billy Stickland/INPHO
Preparing to return to the field five months after his last run in the firing line in Australia, the Patrickswell man admits it was a challenge to switch his mindset back into combative mode. Understandable when so much work has been put in to look after his neck complaint. Asked whether he found it easy to block out his issue when re-entering the fray, Murray said:
“No, it’s not.
“It’s not like a hamstring tear. It is your neck and it surprises you having that awareness of it. But we took the amount of time that was absolutely necessary to get it fully right.
“It’s fully right now, thankfully. It’s something I have to keep on top of in terms of prehab and stuff like that. It feels good now, thankfully.”
The work is clearly paying off. Though the 29-year-old showed what may have been signs of rust – or perhaps they were signs of a slick, wet ball on a bitterly cold day – in the first half of the 30-5 win over Castres, the second half saw him pull free of the skirmish and show all his class to inspire two breakthrough tries.
There was certainly no sign of him taking a tentative or cautious approach to contact in those instances. First he ran to the blindside of a five metre ruck and occupied 118 kilo lock Thibault Lassalle before offloading to Rory Scannell. Then came a beautiful back-hand offload after a gliding arced run to set CJ Stander away.
“No. You can’t,” he says definitively when asked whether he considered adapting his game to account for his injury. That extended time on the sideline was used to make certain that there would be no half measures, no compromises.