Tom Curry walks into the boardroom at Sale’s training ground with a spring in his step. He sits down to give chapter and verse on his brush with retirement, the debilitating hip injury that required six-hour surgery and his gruelling recovery with an openness you would not always associate with one of rugby’s most intense operators. He soon speaks of the five stages of grief and, after 45 minutes in his company, it is clear that Curry has reached acceptance.
To recap, Curry was feeling discomfort in his hip towards the back end of England’s World Cup campaign last year. It did not take long after returning to Sale to discover that “something wasn’t right” and the subsequent scan delivered a prognosis that floored him. “I had a Zoom with the surgeon and he said you are probably going to retire,” says Curry, still just 26.
