PAUL SCULTHORPE hopes, although is not yet 100 per cent certain, that his seven months on the sidelines will end on Saturday. St Helens play the new-look Harlequins at Twickenham Stoop at the start of the engage Super League season, a date that the St Helens and Great Britain captain has had pencilled in his diary since the knee operation that forced his withdrawal from last year’s play-offs and subsequent Tri-Nations series.
He trusts that three years of knee and associated hamstring and back problems have been resolved by the micro-surgery to reintroduce cartilage that had been previously removed. “There was no shock absorber in the knee, so bone was scraping on bone,” he said. “They smashed through the knee. The bleeding forms a barrier and calcifies to form a new layer of soft bone. It’s been a hard time, but everything feels OK now.”
St Helens and Great Britain badly missed him in the autumn and Sculthorpe shared sympathetic chats with Andy Farrell, his predecessor as Britain captain, whose catalogue of injuries over 16 months have prevented him from embarking on a rugby union career. “I’ve never spent so much time out, so what Andy’s going through I dread to think,” Sculthorpe said. “Like me, he’s just desperate to be out there. It wasn ‘t easy watching the Britain boys, having been made captain, then seeing the chance snatched away by injury.”
Without Sculthorpe and Sean Long, who is also scheduled to return, St Helens still finished top of the table last season, but they disintegrated in the play-offs. They start as championship favourites, however, especially if Sculthorpe can recover the form that led to his Man of Steel titles in 2001 and 2002. However, if Sculthorpe is not quite fully recovered, Daniel Anderson, the St Helens coach, will avoid taking a chance on him at this early stage. Sculthorpe expects a late decision on Saturday.
“When he started running, he looked like a broken-down horse and felt like one as well,” Anderson said. “But every session he gets better, there’s less pain and more movement. He’s played 400 games, so your dynamic abilities change by 28. You’re not as sharp, agile and flexible, but Paul’s a highly intelligent player with plenty more in his armoury.”
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Danny Ward, the Britain prop, was included in Castleford Tigers’ initial squad to play Hull on Friday, hours after he signed a two-year contract with the promoted club and less than a month since Leeds Rhinos dismissed him for breaches of club discipline. “Now I can concentrate on rugby. I’ve been carrying on training on my own and with mates,” he said.