Rugby Union: End of Battle for Wounded Three

If there is any justice in the twisted world of the professional sportsman, Charlie Hodgson, Andrew Sheridan and Mark Cueto will report for duty with England today in no fit state to touch a ball or even to get on the plane to the Algarve for the national team's 12-day training camp. Should that turn out to be the case, it would be a familiar enough state of affairs, each having spent long swathes of the out-going season hors de combat, but any incapacitation should hopefully be the result of healthier pursuits.

Hodgson married his childhood sweetheart Daisy in Yorkshire yesterday. His injury-plagued Sale team-mates were there and one hopes that groom and guests alike were allowed to enjoy themselves as much as any normal people would. As long as nobody ruptured a cruciate on the dance floor, or in the beer tent, or in the bridesmaid's boudoir, surely even Team England and the press can turn a blind eye.

So, even as you read this, the honeymoon period is over for Hodgson. He might not be the first person to have set off for Portugal the day after his wedding, but he could well be the first to do so with 46 men and no wife. Usually that happens before a man gets married.

'Daisy's really happy about that,' says Hodgson of their lack of honeymoon plans, while Cueto mumbles something about his team-mate's reluctance to spend money.

The three players are not exactly bouncing off the walls during our interview in a small room, but only because they have become so used to confinement and each other's company over such an interrupted season. The chance, finally, to get out on a field and push for a place at the World Cup must seem all the more precious after the weeks of isolation and rehab.

All three are now officially fit and raring to go. Hodgson and Sheridan went down with their injuries on the same November afternoon at Twickenham last year, as England struggled to a win over South Africa. Hodgson ruptured the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee, the worst of the various knee-ligament injuries, and Sheridan dislocated and fractured his ankle. There was a fear early on that Sheridan's injury might finish his career, but scans put him in the clear. Both had operations and the long haul back to fitness began.

'I like training,' says the famously strong Sheridan, 'but there needs to be something at the end of it, which is the match at the weekend. The hard bit about a long-term injury is the day in, day out monotony without the end in sight.'

Hodgson is less known for his strength, but in the early days of his injury even weight-training seemed a luxury that was a million miles away. 'There's all the little exercises you have to do after an operation that you feel aren't really doing anything, even though they are. You just do them over and over again.'

Only now is Hodgson ready for action. Sheridan surprised everyone by returning as soon as March, but by the end of that month he had torn a medial ligament in his knee, which put him out for the rest of the season.

Nick Johnston, Sale's head of physical preparation, has been overseeing the recovery of a calamitous number of injured players at their state-of-the-art training center, working closely with EAS, the sports-nutrition company. He says we can expect to see Sheridan back to the form that made him one of the most talked-about prop forwards in the game.

'Sheri's flying at the moment,' he says. 'He's in great nick. But you've got to manage him. Sheri is Sheri. You've got to get to know the individuals. If he doesn't get picked for England he won't cry like a baby like some of them. He doesn't have a media campaign before a squad's announced. He just gets on and does his job. And he's had a worse 12 months than anybody.

'And it's the same with Charlie - people have got to understand him better. He's matured massively since the injury. People question his temperament, but I've been with the high-performance guys in New Zealand and they see him as the best first five-eighth, or whatever they call it, next to Dan Carter. He's far more rated down there than he is here.'

So the heavyweight and the artist are ready, what about the speedster, Cueto? No season-ending injury for him but, no less distressing, a series of niggles that have cost him almost as many games as the other two. 'Cuets was a classic case of too much rugby,' says Johnston. 'Year after year of unbroken rugby and it all caught up with him.'

He was troubled by groin, abdominal and calf niggles, such that he even traded in his Porsche for fear that the low-slung driving position might be the root cause. 'The worst thing was that no one knew why it was happening,' says Cueto. 'It was clutching at straws, from your driving position to the kind of trainers you were wearing.'

Cueto could have gone on the recent tour to South Africa, but it was felt he would be better served by staying at home. You sense none of the three was too keen to rush things with the World Cup approaching. But a bullishness about England's prospects builds as the confidence returns to their recovering bodies, as well as to those of the country's other injured players.

'Obviously there's a big debate about club and country, blah, blah, blah,' says Cueto, 'but we've got some brilliant players. Meeting up four days before an international when other sides have had two weeks to prepare isn't ideal, but this time we'll have however many weeks it is before the World Cup and three warm-up games - you can move a team on a lot in that time.' On paper we've got the players to do it.'