Tom Curry: I curled up and cried when I was asked to contemplate retirement

Tom Curry has been through a lot in the past 12 months. From being sent off three minutes into England’s opening World Cup match to finding himself engulfed in a racism storm after reporting an alleged slur at the end of the tournament.

All of that, no matter how traumatic, pales into insignificance to what happened when the flanker returned from the World Cup. Curry had been aware that he had an issue with his hip. He experienced a sharp shooting pain when he walked and says he came down to team breakfast at a “45-degree angle”. Throughout his England career, Curry tends to play the full 80 minutes but such was his discomfort that his game time was being slowly reduced at the World Cup.

When he got back to Sale Sharks, he went for a scan. Curry can still remember where and when he was – driving to pick up his miniature dachshund, Toby – when Sale physio Navdeep Sandhu rang with the results. They were as bad as Curry had feared. “He listed off all the things that were wrong and I was just in tears,” Curry said. “I couldn’t get out and get my dog then so I had to wait like 10 minutes.”

Worse was to come when he had his first consultation with his surgeon, Damian Griffin, who mentioned the “R” word: retirement. “Oh it was horrible,” Curry said. “I was lucky because I had Lilla (his girlfriend) there at the time but I literally just cried. I curled up into a ball. I just couldn’t really process it. It’s quite surreal I think. It was a surreal moment. But you just have to go through those raw emotions then process it all.

“My biggest thing – the hardest bit – was getting to the surgery. I had three weeks until the surgery and I couldn’t really do anything. I was basically useless because you can’t do rehab and you can’t get any better, so it’s basically three weeks standing still and I don’t really do that. Once I had my surgery, I just thought, ‘Now is the process’. Once I got to that point, I could start to process it all a bit more whereas that three weeks was really tough. You are limping around, you have retirement in your head and you’re being useless to everyone.”

Telegraph Sport has already detailed Curry’s rehabilitation process with contributions from Sandhu, Griffin and Jonas Dodoo, his coach at Speedworks who Curry says “taught me how to run again”. While his return to action in the Premiership semi-final against Bath, where he levelled Josh Bayliss with a trademark hit, might seem like the culmination of his comeback, Curry says being able to run again was the most significant milestone.

“The relief was when I could run again because we tried to get back running, we did partial weight-bearing, walking, all the rehab stuff, and then I tried to run and I couldn’t run,” Curry said. “And I think that was the toughest hurdle to get over because I just couldn’t do it and it felt the same. ‘It’s more the day-to-day stuff, like being able to go for a dog walk and not limping. That’s the big relief; those small tasks.”

Curry pays tribute to Sean O’Brien, the former Ireland back row who was a font of advice having suffered a similar injury, as well as his girlfriend and his parents who put him up in their front room in the weeks immediately after the surgery. “I think the energy bill went up £200-300 over that period as I kept the heating on all day and night,” Curry said. For all the support he received, it is clear that it was largely Curry’s single-minded determination that played the most significant role in returning to action, first for Sale and then England on the tour to Japan and New Zealand.

Typically, players use the downtime from a significant injury to invest themselves in a new pastime. When this is put to Curry, he looks aghast. “I don’t understand when people say, ‘I gained a hobby when I was injured, I learned something’. Honestly, I couldn’t think of anything worse,” Curry said. “I’d be playing the piano and thinking, ‘why is that benefiting my hip?’ Do you know what I mean?

“There wasn’t anything where I thought, ‘I’m going to learn this’. I was just so obsessed with my hip. My Instagram page, it’s meant to be quite a fun app, it was just hip exercises. I’ve got a file of saved hip exercises where I thought, ‘I’m going to try that, see if that feels better’. I didn’t learn a thing.”

The biggest thing for Curry was accepting he can no longer go full throttle into every training session. Instead, less is more. “You have to drop a lot of ego,” Curry said. “You can’t just go ‘I am going to do this.’ You have to realise what is going to make you better and it makes you a lot smarter.”

The management of Curry between Sale and England will be an interesting test case for the new Enhanced Elite Player Squad contracts, should the flanker receive one. Sale director of rugby Alex Sanderson believes further surgery could be necessary in around two years. “If he wants to play all the games and we just talked about the intensity he used to train then all medical research suggests he would need another operation in two years,” Sanderson said. “We do have a bit more care, concern and foresight so now we know how to stretch out that for two years.”

Curry himself does not put a timeframe on when he would need another operation but is clear that he will not change his all-action style for club or country. “No way,” he said. “This hasn’t happened because of contact.”

A revenge game against South Africa is on the horizon this autumn – “I couldn’t think of a better game to get involved in if I get the chance” – but first and foremost Curry wants to vindicate the faith that England head coach Steve Borthwick showed by taking him on last summer’s tour. “In terms of being able to have that confidence from Steve and the coaches, it was massive,” Curry said. “I just want to repay him by getting myself fit, staying fit, and playing as well as I can really.”