Exeter explain the reason why Cowan-Dickie recovery is taking its time

Rob Baxter has shared his thoughts on the situation with Luke Cowan-Dickie, the injured Exeter hooker who hopes to play for England at the upcoming Rugby World Cup before joining Montpellier for the 2023/24 Top 14 season in France. The 29-year-old front-rower hasn’t played since limping from the January 7 Gallagher Premiership win over Northampton with an ankle injury.

He missed the entire Guinness Six Nations, the first England campaign under new head coach Steve Borthwick, and he was also recently the subject of media reports in France alleging that his already-signed deal with Montpellier could be off due to a separate neck injury that had previously been public knowledge.

That has generated much speculation about his future, an issue that Baxter addressed on Thursday at his media briefing ahead of this Sunday’s Heineken Champions Cup round-of-16 clash… with Montpellier, the team Cowan Dickie is scheduled to be joining.

“He is having an assessment today [Thursday] which will give him some guidance on how the injury is recovering. He has got another one booked in in a few weeks’ time. The RFU are also investigating to see if there is anything they can do to speed up the recovery, they are concerned World Cup-wise. So everything has been poured into it.

“I feel a bit sorry for the guy, he is a bit like a live experiment for everybody but obviously he is desperate to get on with things as well. There is nothing definitively saying here and now that he won’t be fit by the end of the season, but there is also definitively saying that he will be.”

What is the problem? “The issue at the moment is nerve recovery… Now there are sometimes a surgeon or a specialist might go, ‘Look, this is as good as it is going to get’ but that is quite rare. Most of them are, ‘This has improved from the last time we assessed you’, so that means we are still on an improvement curve.

“That is where Luke is at the moment, he is on an improvement curve and what has to happen is that has just got to maintain it to get him back to full fitness. Where that recovery stops will be where he ends up on his fitness pathway. It is not necessarily a plateau, it’s just the time that has to pass.

“Montpellier haven’t been in touch with us. I don’t think anyone is sitting here thinking the move is off. Everyone is thinking Luke is going to make a decent recovery and he is going to be ready to go and he is going to be a very good player. That is the overriding feeling around the club, and we haven’t had any indication that that is going to change.”

Baxter has one particular reason for wanting Cowan-Dickie to play again as quickly as possible. “There is nobody in the club wanting Luke Cowan-Dickie to be fit more than me because he is an absolute nightmare when he is not playing.

“It is bad enough when he is playing but sometimes the only thing you hear around the club is Luke screaming at a physio to move to the next session or get on with this, or grabbing one of the S&C coaches and going, ‘What are we doing next?’

“He is a bit like a caged lion at the moment, prowling around trying to get on with things. 100 per cent, if he can get fit before the end of the season for us or before the World Cup, he will be flying. There is every good reason to get him fit because he will fly into it with absolute abandon.

“That part of it is without doubt. He isn’t walking around with his head down going, ‘Poor me’. It’s almost the other way around. That is the part of his character that if he is going to get back quickly will drive him as much as anything else.”