“My family were sick of it” – Luke Fitzgerald reflects on injury-ravaged career

Luke Fitzgerald played his last game of rugby, the Pro 12 final at Murrayfield, with no feeling in his left arm and a torn medial ligament in his right knee.

Normal enough 80 minutes for Fitzgerald. The neck went again. Worse pain than ever before.

“After the scans the doc [Ashley Poynton] said I can’t play anymore. I probably would play (on). My mum is happy I’m not. She is sick of it.

“My dad as well. My family is happy for me to call it a day because they have seen the brunt of what a 10 year career can do. I’ve had a lot of injuries.”

A freakish amount, charting all the way back to a badly damaged collarbone in sixth year. Still, he returned to play the schools final at Lansdowne road on St Patrick’s Day 2006.

That’s the concern because within five months of his Leaving Certificate he was capped for Ireland. Aged just 19.

But every opinion that mattered 10 years ago felt Fitzgerald was physically ready for the man’s game.

“It’s hard to keep a player back when they are physically able for it,” says Brian O’Driscoll. “Normally you have to invest two, three years before you get capped but it just happened that Lukey was a child prodigy...Different bodies break down in different ways...

“Even at the end of this season he showed what he can add to a team.

“Leinster and Ireland are going to miss that, they are going to miss having a game changer.”

That is why this went on for so long. Fitzgerald was a wonderfully balanced player not too long after his father, Des, the former Ireland tighthead prop and current chief executive of EBS, dropped a rugby ball into his cot.

There is no need to sift into his scar tissue. Suffice to say these wounds would have crippled another person. But Fitzgerald looks like a 28 year-old-elite athlete. It is what happened on the inside that denied him what seemed a certain ascent to greatness.

Still, capped as a teenager, he made the Lions Test team to face South Africa at 21 before the ruptured knee ligaments in November 2009 began constant interruptions for the Leinster left wing.

Maybe, it is suggested to him, if they had of held him back, kept him in check for a season or two, until he grew accustomed to the hits, as they do now with Ireland under-20s captain James Ryan and all those he recently led to a World Cup final, it would have been different.

Fitzgerald never played AIL. Never played Ireland under-20s. Straight out of school his outrageous talent screamed that he was ready.

“I know where you are coming from but it is really hard to say, really hard to gauge. I probably got a little unlucky in the initial couple of years. If you look at the training now the set-up, the training is so much better, so much more streamlined, people know way more.

“But like Drico said I was ready for the training, I was way stronger, more powerful, way more balanced than a lot of guys coming out of school. I had good principles coming from my dad and access to Dave Fagan, who is doing the Leinster sub academy now, from an early age.

“So I was ahead of the posse. Although, I did get an injury in my final year in school which did set me back. I broke my collarbone, a compound fracture, which is serious enough. I never got that strong again, throughout my whole career. My upper body was strongest when I was 18! I’d say that might have had a bigger effect than you would be able to quantify.”

That is what makes this Fitzgerald interview, the exit interview so to speak, so interesting. He is one of the second generation of professional rugby players in this country, having been capped alongside the now 32 year old Jamie Heaslip and enormously powerful Stephen Ferris against the Pacific Islanders in November 2006. Ferris is gone a few years due to terrible injuries. Heaslip plays the game with remarkable footwork that allows him, at the very last moment, to avoid the full brunt of contact.

“But look at a guy like (Andrew) Porter. He is in there squatting 350 kilos in the gym. Like, how do you tell a fella like that ‘you are not strong enough to get in the game.’”

Leinster have done just that. Porter is only entering year one of the Leinster Academy this summer.

“But considering how physical the game is and how much better the athletes are it is probably no harm keeping a guy back a year or two but the problem is you get to accelerate your learning by getting access to training and playing with guys at the top level.”

Michael Cheika gave Fitzgerald a choice on the first day of his first pre-season: Want to train with Felipe Contepomi, O’Driscoll, Denis Hickie, Shane Horgan and Gordon D’Arcy or the Academy?

It was no choice at all.

“I never even played an A game for Leinster. Are we the guinea pigs?

“Yeah, it’s a young sport. Does it take anything away from the experience for me? It doesn’t. I just feel I was unlucky.”

He was, undoubtedly, unlucky, yet now his time has passed the regrets seem too few to mention.