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It was tough to say who'd gone whiter in the face, rugby player Tudu Sailen who was sprawled on the pitch, frothing at his mouth after suffering his first concussion, or Dr Sandeep Chaudhary, the attendant physio, who was still in the first few months of his stint with the national ruggers, and not fully knowing what all injuries to expect in this contact-sport, or their extent. Chaudhary admits he stood there at a club game a tad second extra, gauging the damage to the player, while he hoped against the worst, dying a thousand metaphorical deaths.
"It turned out to be only a concussion. But when I went running to the middle of the pitch after the ref whistled, and saw the player lying on the ground motionless frothing at his mouth, I did the quickest revisions of all that I'd studied over the years. I even remembered stuff that I hadn't mugged up for examinations, but could use here if the situation was desperate!" he recalls with a guffaw now. The doc will never forget those few seconds when he realised that rugby was a different ball-game, and promptly re-calibrated his notions of brutal injuries in sport.
Swollen cheeks, narrowed eyes, torn ligaments and dislocated knees are par for the course for rugby players. India's Commonwealth Games preparation stints in South Africa and New Zealand were spent as much on conquering this very fear as on sharpening their tactical games. Shoulders, knees and ankles bear the maximum brunt, but in the tumult of tackles and swift running involved, there's no telling what might suddenly snap or flare.
Years of repeating the simple back pass a flick of wrists with a jerky torque left Bikash Jena with torn ligaments after a noisy snapping of bones, while Deepak Dagar, one of India's fastest legs, suffered from varicose veins in his calves, which stuck out looking oddly swollen. City-mate Kamaldeep Dagar got treated for a more conventional rugby injury: 15 stitches above his left eye after being kicked by a rival in a club game.
Glamorous gashes they might be, but most scars aren't all that pretty to look at. Even India's kicker Rohaan Sethna, who his team-mates jokingly chide as having only a mirror for a best friend has made peace with having crooked fingers on both his hands after all those tackles.
If the picture painted has been of the Indians always being at the receiving end, it needs correction. India's fittest player Amit Lochab, who the physio has seen very little of since he's hardly ever landed on the stretcher table, played a game when he left a fallen army of battered rival bodies in his try-scoring wake. "Anyone he touched was stretchered out as he raged like a bull," a team-mate remembers.
But Dr Chaudhary says the game calls for all-or-nothing courage. "We don't scare them by saying 'be careful.' The more cautious they try to be, the greater injury-prone they'll be," he says.
When in rugby, thence, you can't cringe your nose at injuries. Not unless you are India's talented find Thimmaiah Mandanda. This rugger always had a slightly tilted nose to the left, a birth deformity that blended with his rugby team-mates, all with their own share of cosmetic skeletal woes. Then one day, Thimmaiah got a nasty nudge on the pitch that left his nose bloodied. Upon recovery, his nose was discovered to be now tilting crooked to the right slightly. Dr Chaudhary wasn't frantically summoned to fix this one.
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