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The Leinster update on Friday's tear-jerking Ryan Baird injury
By Liam Heagney
It was sweetness and light post-game with Leinster on Friday night amid the fuzzy warmth of the battering given to Leicester, but the one hot topic they couldn’t illuminate was the seriousness of the shoulder injury sustained by Ryan Baird, the effervescent 23-year-old who had been in the form of the career.
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He had started the Grand Slam clinching win over England and shone again in last weekend’s round-of-16 civil war with Ulster, but his Heineken Champions Cup quarter-final appearance cruelly lasted a mere 22 minutes.
Baird crashed into the breakdown that Andrew Porter had carried to near the Leicester line only to find Tommy Reffell in an immovable penalty-winning position and he brutally fell off the side of the collision zone, tears welling in his eyes as the enormity of the pain in his right shoulder wincingly hit home.
Off he trudged, his jersey rolled up around his arm as a temporary bandage, and the stressful question now is the severity of the damage sustained. Has it prematurely ended his season? Or worse, could it threaten his preparations to make the Ireland Rugby World Cup squad in September?
We don’t know at this early stage and Leo Cullen wasn’t in the mood to do a Dr Google on it when quizzed in the post-mortem on the status of the setback. “It’s his shoulder. We’re not sure exactly, we’ll see how that settles down,” he succinctly said, adding that it wasn’t a reinjury to a problem encountered earlier in the season. “No, different injury. That was more his neck at the time.”
It was only last month when Ireland boss Andy Farrell enthused that Baird would go on “to better and better things”. Injuring your shoulder three weeks later wasn’t what was envisaged and it will be a case of waiting on a squad update from Leinster ahead of Tuesday’s flight to South Africa for a URC double-header before further light can be shed on how Baird is fixed.
Despite the loss of the No6 with the scoreboard at 14-3, Leinster weren’t found wanting and their decisive power surge arrived in the early 10-minute second-half spell when they were reduced to 14 through Caelan Doris’ yellow card.
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Rather than getting tested on the back foot defending a 17-10 lead, they flicked the switch and vaulted 27-10 clear by the time Doris returned – and they then galloped on to win 55-24 and set up a home semi-final versus Toulouse or the Sharks. Neat.
“Lots of pleasing things in the game, definitely areas where we can get better. We are delighted to be through to the next round,” enthused Cullen. “The beauty of playing on Friday now is we get to watch the other three games without the stress of having our game. We’re heading to South Africa on Tuesday so we will see how everybody is.
“Definitely it [the Leicester try before half-time] made us quite quiet and made us have a good look at ourselves at half-time, and then Caelan gets binned and we are down to 14 but the response at that stage was really positive. It definitely focused the minds… that 10-minute period of Caelan’s bin and the 10, 15 minutes after that was where the game went away from Leicester.
“We plan for lots of different scenarios, and we dealt with that scenario well which was good. Everyone is clear in terms of what we go to. I thought they were excellent. It’s huge effort over the last couple of weeks, an usual dynamic, 10 weeks to lead into your last-16 game and then you have a six-day lead into this game.
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“It takes a huge amount of effort from the players because they are out there delivering but the backroom team and how the managed the group to everybody who is involved in ticketing and promoting the game to the fans that turn up in such great numbers, it’s great. For the guys, it’s a real privilege and honour for us to be here.”
