Cardiff nightmare finally in the rearview mirror
Natwest Six Nations - Ireland v Wales
O’Mahony was in sensational form when he ruptured his ACL in the final pool game against France in Cardiff. It took 12 months just to pull on a Munster jersey again but the road to recovery still has a few more minor steps before the journey feels complete.
“It just doesn’t feel like the other knee, you know? It’s invasive, it’s a big surgery. Not too long ago it finished a lot of people but luckily, thanks to lots of breakthroughs, it’s now quite a standard procedure.
“You hear of guys coming back after six or nine months. It wasn’t for me.
“It was sore for a lot longer than that and it takes time to get back to that sharpness. I feel like I’mgetting there now, yeah.”
Getting there. Wow. The injury occurred almost two-and-a-half years ago.
He spoke at the time to other players who had gone through the torturous ACL rehab programme and so he knew all too well that he would remain a long way short of where he needed to be even after his first steps back on a rugby field.
But knowing that and squaring it away are not the same.
“It’s hard to do because a lot of your rehab stuff is very day-by-day focused. It’s hard to see sometimes the long picture at it. You know you’ve a bit to go, you know?
“Even when you’re coming back for your first game, you’re wondering if it was the right decision or not.
“At the time of running on to the pitch you’re second-guessing yourself but you get through it and game-by-game you start feeling better, trusting it more and more and now, luckily, you just don’t think about it.”
The thought that he may never be the same player again did cross his mind but there was no one moment in any game where he felt fully reassured about the trajectory he was on. Such clarity is rare when improvement is so incremental.
O’Mahony returned for Munster in September of 2016 but, while he had recorded some impressive performances for the province by November, he was deemed a tad shy of the required match sharpness for the historic game in Chicago.
Sean O’Brien suffered the same misfortune.
“There’s leeway and there’s understanding but they’re not going to put you in if you’re not performing. Or they’re not going to say, ‘Ah, he played well for us 12 months ago, or 18 months ago, and I’m going to pick him this weekend because he did that’.
“That’s not the way the business is run so when I started getting back, guys who were fitter and had more game time and were playing better than me with Ireland were getting picked. And so they should have been because I wasn’t there yet, I wasn’t ready for it.”
A period on the bench followed for big tests against Australia and, in the 2017 Six Nations, France and Wales before Jamie Heaslip’s own injury misfortune reopened the door to the back row for a start against England in Twickenham.
A Lions tour, and a stint wearing the armband against the All Blacks, has come and gone since and further confirmation that he has returned to something like his best came with strong performances against France and Italy in recent weeks.
If O’Mahony is in better form now than 12 months ago then the case to say the same for Ireland is less assured with the Cork forward admitting there is disappointment with the side’s inconsistency in the opening rounds.
Wales have been a pretty reliable barometer for where Ireland find themselves in recent times so Joe Schmidt’s side will be eager to make amends for their 22-9 loss in Cardiff last year when everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
Jonathan Sexton spent two stints on the sideline due to a yellow card and then a HIA. Conor Murray had to be replaced five minutes after the interval and then there was Robbie Henshaw’s rush of blood to the head in illegally joining a maul on the Welsh line.
“Yeah, we have to be better,” said O’Mahony. “It’s 12 months on from the last Six Nations and you have to be improving. There are scenarios that we know might happen or might not happen but we’ve got to be prepared.
“We are certainly better prepared and we have to be. We have to be if we’re talking about beating teams like France and Italy and coming up against Wales now, we have to be better than 12 months ago.”
