Manu Tuilagi’s previous ploys to stay injury-free have included going to see a witch doctor, walking the Peak District, and weight loss – but now the England centre has concluded there is no substitute for sleep.
Tuilagi is fit again, in form, and if he was unable to prevent Sale from exiting the Champions Cup at the quarter-final stage for the second consecutive season on Sunday he demonstrated his sharpness with a well-taken try on the stroke of half-time that would have thrilled Eddie Jones.
With the Premiership playoffs a distant prospect for Sale, Tuilagi is likely to have just two more domestic matches this season but, provided there are no further injury problems, he is certain to tour Australia with England for a three-match series Jones’s side cannot afford to lose.
For Tuilagi, it has yet again been a stop-start season blighted by injury with another Six Nations campaign missed and 10 appearances for the Sharks. He is learning to accept the logic in sitting out the odd match – he was rested for Sale’s victory against Newcastle to ensure he was primed to face Racing 92 – but there is fuel in the tank to face the Wallabies and, all going well, serve as a reminder as to why England’s hopes at the World Cup next year largely hinge on his fitness.
During the Six Nations, Tuilagi was due to play against Wales, having recovered from the hamstring injury sustained last autumn against South Africa. He had a setback in training just before that match, however, and having made only two appearances for Sale before being called upon by England the national side faced questions over rushing him back too quickly. Not from Sale it should be said, but Alex Sanderson, the club’s director of rugby, conceded that more dialogue between club and country would benefit all parties, with Sale having already borrowed a GPS unit from England so that the national coaches could monitor his progress.
For Tuilagi, the key is recognising the need to recover, and to rest. “I think sleep is a big thing for me,” he said. “I never used to sleep … I used to sleep really late. For an athlete you need, for me, at least seven hours. So that’s what I looked at when the latest hammy happened. If you keep doing the same thing, you are going to get the same result. So you’ve got to change something.
“I had a chat with my wife, actually. I was talking to her, saying to her about how I woke up 20 minutes, 30 minutes before we had the walk-throughs and then you get into training … like, I am saying to her sometimes it’s actually hard, you have to take ownership of it and be honest with yourself, because only you know what’s happened. And my wife is saying: ‘You’re an athlete, you’ve got to sleep.’ We had that chat and then you’ve just got to be honest with yourself. And you’ve got to change something if you want a different result.”
If Tuilagi made a conscious effort to trim a few pounds at the end of last season, he has lost nothing in terms of power. His mental strength is arguably his greatest asset, however, time and again demonstrating an ability to stay sanguine whenever the latest injury setbacks strike. “I am really thankful for those injuries that I came through,” he said.
“And just in life you are definitely going to go through some hard times – I bet you guys have come through some tough times in your life – and that’s a good thing, because you can only learn from that, as a feeling. You can’t learn from someone else’s mistakes, because you don’t feel it. But when you have that, you’ve got to embrace it. It’s not good at the time but you look back and think: ‘Yah, it was good, that.’
“It’s more the mental side of the game that is much more important than the physical side of the game. The game is so physical nowadays, but if your mind is stronger, mentally, nothing can stop you. You have to listen your body but as an athlete sometimes you get too excited and you just want to be out there on the field. And you ignore what your body is telling you. You’ve just got to listen to it. Because if your body says no, you can’t do anything.”
