Tis but a scratch.
To this day, Wycliff Palu can’t understand how Paul O’Connell was still on the pitch when Kurtley Beale missed that late, late kick in the Lions’ First Test victory over Australia.
O’Connell had fractured his arm, he suspects, in tackling the Wallabies prop. There were just under 10 minutes to go and the Lions’ lead was being chipped away. O’Connell wasn’t going anywhere.
He felt something ‘straight away’ and went down. There were two reasons for this – one part pain, one part time-wasting. O’Connell had just fractured a bone in his arm but was still thinking about running the clock down and giving his teammates a breather.
Dr James Robson asked O’Connell to squeeze his hand but the lock couldn’t, first time around. He somehow managed it on the second try and convinced the doctor he was fine. The on-field prognosis was a trapped nerve.
In O’Connell’s book The Battle [out October 6], he states:
‘You get 20 bangs a game and they fade away after a minute, so there was no big deal about seeing [the game] out.
‘At times like that, there’s so much adrenaline going you barely notice the pain.’
And so on he played. On he tackled. On he urged.
At the final whistle, though, the realisation appeared to sink in. O’Connell was not sure if his tour was over or not.
He wanted to stay on and play with protective strapping on his damaged arm. ‘It wasn’t like I was 22, with my whole future ahead of me,’ he writes.
A scan of his arm revealed a previous unnoticed wrist fracture of the same arm. He was asked to hang around and he did so, lending a helping voice – not a hand – in the lineout and rucking drills.
At one stage, O’Connell had considered retiring after the 2013 Lions Tour. After picking up that injury, and watching from the sidelines as the Lions won the series 2-1, he steeled himself and set goals that were further down the road.
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