SURELY, the things you miss the most when they are gone are what were once guaranteed. It is also a joy to watch rugby at Kingsholm, where the prospect of a Gloucester revival adds extra allure this season.
But it will still be a shock when they take the field without James Simpson-Daniel, who retired last week with an ankle injury. It will also ensure that all of us use the edge of our seats less than we might have done. How infrequently did Sinbad disappoint us?
It is almost painful to realise that this great player won only a miserly 10 caps. I can certainly name at least 10 players of various nationalities who won 50 but who were not remotely as talented in terms of attacking visions or all-round footballing ability.
Yet the combination of those horrible injuries and the lack of selectorial trust conspired so often. Thank goodness that some of us were able to catch a good few of his 274 appearances for the Gloucester first team and his 119 tries. The idea that he suffered from a lack of durability is blown to the four winds by the statistic that he played in 184 Premiership matches, a club record, more than the most teak-hard Gloucester veterans of any era.
In his school days at Sedbergh and at under-18 level he was an inside back, often a fly-half. It has never been satisfactorily explained to me why all his coaches tended to shunt him out to outside centre or wing. He had the ability to create space with his surprising strength and those amazing feet, as well as simply to capitalise on space made by others. I remember in the melancholy season that Gloucester endured in 2013-14 he could still pop up in midfield and draw several defenders to create tries.
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As for try-scoring, choose any from a myriad of memories. I can remember a gorgeous hat-trick against Bath in a league game at Kingsholm in 2002, when he was just setting out his stall. I can recall two more in the win over Northampton in the 2003 Powergen Cup final in front of 75,000 at Twickenham.
Perhaps the most visited among online clips is the one showing a try he scored for England against the Barbarians in 2002. He was marking the giant figure of Jonah Lomu. Lomu lined up his man when Simpson-Daniel was in possession as if to smash him into the fourth row of the stand. Lomu set himself for the tackle but, as he tried to deliver it, Simpson-Daniel had already slipped past with the most exquisite in-and-out manoeuvre in a tiny space down the touchline. Lomu smashed thin air, Simpson-Daniel ran on to score.
Later that same year he won his first full cap, playing in a 31-28 victory over New Zealand at Twickenham in an autumn when England won all three of their matches. Against Australia Simpson-Daniel conspired beautifully with Ben Cohen to create a try.
In the run-up to the 2003 Rugby World Cup, he played against Wales at Cardiff in the warm-up game but then missed the main event through a back injury. A man of his vast ability could well have created his own career watershed in that momentous tournament had only he stayed fit.
Thereafter the injuries came with bitterly frustrating regularity. He stayed fit enough to maintain hero status at Kingsholm but not long enough to mount a real charge for a regular international place that his talents so resoundingly deserved.
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It was a crying shame that last season, when he was clearly returning to top form, he had to play behind a misfiring pack in a team which lost confidence. He broke his ankle in an LV Cup match against Newcastle last autumn and never managed to regain full fitness.
“I was hammering the rehabilitation and it was going well up to a certain point, when I was advised to hang up my boots. I was always aware after the injury there was a possibility of not playing again. Now I am still totally shocked and it will take a while to sink in.”
Mainstream and social branches of the media have overflowed with heartfelt tributes to Simpson-Daniel, and his own dismay that it should have ended like this. He will always be ranked in this quarter as one of the greatest and most exciting rugby talents of the era in any arena, and even a fiery Gloucester at their best this season will not quite make up for the sense of loss.
The new Sinbad is eagerly awaited in the game, but to achieve that kind of status will take a very special player indeed.