A few hundred people showed up at Cork airport in 2003 to welcome a slightly confused looking Christian Cullen to Munster. Cullen was one of the very best back three players in the sport at the time and if you’re looking for a modern-day comparison, imagine signing the Cheslin Kolbe we know today – that was Christian Cullen in 2003, but even the Kolbe comparison doesn’t really do him justice.
When Munster announced the signing of Christian Cullen, he was just 27 years of age and coming off a Super Rugby season where he scored eight tries in twelve games for the Hurricanes and featured intermittently for the All Blacks where he scored four tries in five tests.
Even with the fuss over his repeated dropping from the All Blacks panel by John Mitchell, Cullen was a superstar. He was a declaration of Munster’s ambition to win big in Europe and it was a signing that made others sit up and take notice. For good reason. Cullen was expected to be the final piece of Munster’s Heineken Cup-winning jigsaw after the disappointment of the Heineken Cup final defeat to Leicester in 2003. We needed someone who could score tries for us and make our backline more dangerous against top-end opponents and Cullen fit the bill perfectly.
It was not to be.
Cullen suffered a knee injury, repeated injuries to both shoulders and only managed 44 caps for Munster in his four seasons at the club. At the time, the idea of Cullen returning fit and firing was a constant “what if” for Munster fans but it never really happened. By the time the Heineken Cup final in 2006 rolled around, Cullen was ruled out due to a calf-strain suffered against the Scarlets in Stradey Park two weeks prior. No one was really shocked. It wasn’t his fault, he was just blighted with injuries and sometimes there’s nothing you can do.
Jean De Villiers suffered injuries when he signed in 2009 that disrupted his first few months. Gerhard Van Den Heever was a relatively big project player signing in 2013, but he rarely saw a spell without injury. Tyler Bleyendaal arrived at Munster with a serious neck injury suffered after his signing was announced ahead of the 2013/14 season.
Francis Saili’s first game for Munster after signing from the Blues in 2015 saw him getting knocked out cold in a preseason friendly. We signed Mark Chisholm the same season but he was also blighted by injury. Jean Kleyn was signed in 2016 but suffered a number of injuries in his first season and since.
Chris Cloete and Chris Farrell were signed to Munster in 2017 to improve us in the knockout stages of Europe and the PRO14 but we lost both players for the entire season in one week – Cloete broke his arm and Farrell injured his knee.
Gerbrandt Grobler was a controversial signing but part of the reason his story was missed by the galaxy brain press corp was down to him injuring his ankle in a preseason friendly and missing six months of the season.
So when RG Snyman went down after a lineout after seven minutes on his debut with what has since been confirmed as an ACL tear, it wasn’t a shock. It was just an old friend that you hate sitting down next to you on the couch and puking into your lap. And that’s before we get to the injuries suffered by Dave Kilcoyne and Jean Kleyn in the same game.
There is no overarching theme to this. It’s just a litany of bad luck. I get emails in my inbox every other month looking for some kind of systemic enquiry as to what might be causing this blight of injuries to new signings because bad luck just isn’t acceptable to some people.
Some are blaming the lineout lifters in RG Snyman’s case and while I get the urge to apportion blame, I think it’s misplaced. When you go into the air, there are a hundred things that can go wrong when you are in contact with others that are also in the air and only a small percentage of those moments end with an ACL tear.
Your lifters try to stay in contact but that isn’t always possible in a fluid situation with huge men tussling for an egg-shaped ball 8 or 9 feet in the air.
In Snyman’s case, he stole the ball at the top of the lift but Billy Holland couldn’t stay attached at the back and that lead to the fall. Ideally, it wouldn’t have happened but everyone who jumps in a lineout knows this kind of thing is a possibility. It’s why I’ve only ever jumped in one lineout ever (in 2014) and hated every nanosecond of it.
I wish Snyman a speedy recovery. ACL tears are tricky ones to time out but, with a bit of luck, we’ll see Snyman again before the end of the forthcoming 20/21 season. Let’s hope his second Munster debut goes way, way better.
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