Things looking op for Healy
CIAN PUTS NECK ON LINE & SAYS HE WILL BE FIT FOR CUP
BY DAIRE WALSH
IT’S been a season of highs and lows for Cian Healy but he’s hoping neck surgery can now give him a free run to the World Cup.
Despite playing a significant part in Ireland’s Six Nations Championship success, a series of injuries limited the experienced tighthead to nine appearances at provincial level.
And that neck operation meant that the Clontarf man was marked absent for the closing weeks of Leinster’s troublesome campaign.
But Healy is confident he will back to full fitness in time for Ireland’s hotly-anticipated World Cup odyssey.
“I wasn’t going to go into surgery if it was going to cut me out of a World Cup,” he revealed. “I was sat down and told everything, that all going well I’ll be ready by the end of July to be hitting scrums and full tackles.
“After surgery everything went as well, if not better than expected. There’s going to be something going wrong for me to not make it.
“There’s still a lot of swelling from the procedure but once that goes down, I’ll have a much better gauge of how my arm feels and how my hands feel.”
A problematic hamstring issue meant that Healy was also short of match sharpness in the build-up to the Six Nations.
As a result, he had to wait until the decisive encounter against Scotland to finally regain a starting place in the front-row.
But Healy is always confident of making a full recovery from each injury although the enforced retirement of former Leinster and Connacht scrum-half Paul O’Donohoe was a reminder to him how serious nerve injuries could be.
He said: “You sit down with a surgeon, you look like you’re seeing a ghost. They’re going to list off every worst possibility and then finish with a bit of good news.
“Nerves have ended careers. Paul O’Donohoe, a friend of mine, he had to finish over a sciatic nerve thing. It was quite close in my mind how serious it could have been.”
Healy admits that the Irish players will be entering the World Cup with the intention of challenging for the Webb Ellis Cup.
“Under the Joe show and the attitude everyone has, I’d have no qualms in saying we’re going into it to win it,” he said. “There’s nothing else on our mentality. Every player loves being there. The environment is amazing.
“Coming back for this Six Nations I realised you can see from being on the outside and then inside how much everyone loves that and thrives on it.”
On the club front it was less profitable for Leinster this year and the Blues will not be involved in the Pro12 play-offs this weekend.
Healy admitted: “It’s not nice to have to sit around and watch more games going on. But I think the lads are all pretty good at accepting that and moving on.”