Max Lahiff has revealed his 2022/23 pre-season with Bristol Bears got off to an unfortunate start after the jetlagged prop oversleep and missed the start of the first meeting of the season.
Lahiff, 33, has a big role to play at Bristol this season with former All Black tighthead John Afoa leaving the club last month to take up a two-year player coach role at French ProD2 side Vannes.
That means Lahiff is set for plenty of game time with Kyle Sinckler likely to be away with England for a huge chunk of the league season, and a raft of promising but largely unproven tightheads below the two experienced campaigners.
Speaking on Tuesday to RugbyPass’s Offload podcast where he is a regular host, Lahiff said: “I have still got bad jet lag and what happened was I slept straight through my alarm so I walked into the first meeting of pre-season 10 minutes late.
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"Everyone was getting up and doing intros to all the new signings and the props went first and they started asking ‘Where is Max? Someone ring him.’
“I am looking at my phone waking up at 8.30am in my house, the meeting started at 8.30am so it was full panic stations, the alarm was still ringing as I had slept through it for like an hour. I have just had to haul it in, the fear of the god was in me. So a great start to pre-season for me.”
Lahiff has certainly been well travelled during off-season with trips to Thailand and the USA packed in, the latter to celebrate teammate Dan Thomas’ stag do in Las Vegas, but the frontrower has returned to the Bears’ High Performance Centre in stunning physical shape, as ever.
Discussing the first day of pre-season training, he said: “It was the first day yesterday but it wasn’t too bad. The lads ran the Bronco but me being the oldest man in the squad I didn’t have to run it, I just had to do a little circuit of the off-feet equipment.
“I am 33 now, I am an old timer. It is the beginning of the end," he said with a laugh.
“I am a prop, I have got a bad lower back, that leads to real referral issues down the calves and the hamstrings. It is not good when you have to run for five minutes.”
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