Rory joined Hawks as stepping stone to Glasgow--albeit for only one month-I think fastrack is expression

Fighting fit
Mark Palmer

Rory Lamont is finally pain-free and desperate to rejoin brother Sean in the Scotland squad


The surgeon’s knife was only supposed to make a small incision in his groin, but Rory Lamont awoke to find it had cleaved his working life in two. And how he smiled. For the part of himself, his career, that he left in a hospital bed this summer, he’d been trying to shed for years.
The player that strode out of Glasgow’s Ross Hall hospital left clutching the keys to a rugby world far removed from the one inhabited by the limping waif who had fetched up there the day before. The pain was gone, the future was here. “I felt like a new man, a new player,” recalls the 24-year-old. “Lying in bed after I’d had it explained to me what had gone on during the op was the happiest I’ve been in a long time: everything became clear.” The medics had just finished recounting their own discovery; the hiding place of the ball and chain that had done its best to hold Lamont back for years.



Since his early twenties, the back-three man had battled acute groin and abdominal complaints, throbs that rarely left their sufferer’s side but always fled the doctors’ diagnoses. Whatever the root of its earlier expression, by the time Glasgow Warriors staff persuaded him to seek advice that might at least narrow the range of possibilities, Lamont’s pain was being caused by a case of Gilmore’s groin. The condition is similar to a regular hernia, except that the rips to the lower abdominal muscles are not generally big enough for the abdominal matter to sneak through. Unusually, however, Lamont had matching tears on either side, the messy bequest of hours of kicking and twisting at full-back or on the wing. All it took was a single afternoon to paint right over all this internal graffiti.

“I had a couple of months of rehab to get through, but pretty much as soon as I got out of hospital my body felt good, and there haven’t been any serious twinges since,” says Lamont. “It’s such a relief to be pain-free — and exciting to think of what I could actually achieve with full fitness. The groin stuff has stopped me reaching any level of fitness, and I reckon I’ve probably only done about 50% of the Glasgow sessions in that last year, which is nowhere near enough if you want to go places. Now I feel I can be a better player than I’ve ever proved myself to be.”

He now has considerably less internal baggage to carry with him to auditions, and already it has shown. An extended run at full-back (his “natural” position) has coincided with Glasgow’s first concerted spurt of victories since Sean Lineen took charge last March. Lamont again impressed in the Warriors’ dramatic last-gasp 20-19 win over the Borders on Friday night, and the opposite slide in Hugo Southwell and Edinburgh’s form has put him on the back-three shortlist ahead of the final round of pre-Six Nations interviews that January’s Magners League and European ties will constitute.

Although Frank Hadden has already told Lamont he doesn’t envisage his long-term international future being at full-back, his current execution of the role has established him as a compelling candidate for the here and now at least. As fitness has come, form has followed, with Lamont reminding us of his shattering ability with ball in hand, and that enviable faculty for joining the dots of his team’s backline by popping up in phase after phase of both its attacking and defensive work. In the two months or so since he and Glasgow really started to feel the wind at their backs, Lamont has been making, and breaking, more tackles than any of those men who consider themselves among the possibles to don that venerable blue No15 shirt at Twickenham on February 3.

“I know Frank doesn’t view me as a full-back, but I feel that’s where I could really excel and get myself into that cotland team,” he says. “I get into the game more there, make more line breaks and tackle breaks. I feel I do the basics well, anyway: I tackle well, and I’m safe under the high ball. I’m happy enough to do a job on the wing, but sometimes it’s difficult to get involved from there. Full-back is great because you’re not so dependent on other people bringing you into the game. I know that if I keep playing well between now and the Six Nations, I’m in with a shout, even though I know I’ve fallen down the pecking order quite a bit.” It was fate alone that gave him the shove around this time last year. That November, despite only moving untroubled by his groin for “three weeks tops” at any one stretch, Lamont had started the first two autumn tests on the opposite flank to brother Sean, only missing out on the final match with the All Blacks because of concussion sustained the previous week against Samoa. This knock stayed with him for a full three months, causing him dizziness and blinding headaches whenever he exercised. “I probably should have mentioned it to people, but as a player you want to play,” he admits. Especially when all last season’s other complaints were considerably harder to hide: the medial ligaments he damaged in the autumn, the fractured cheekbone and broken jaw that wrote off his Six Nations, and the shin splints with which he shuffled onto the plane for Scotland A’s summer business in Canada. “It really was a hellish year, for getting any fitness or consistency,” he says. “I suppose it makes you realise what you’ve got when things do go well.” Like right now, for instance. But if darkness is never indefinite in sport, neither do the good times continue to roll of their own accord. Lamont and Glasgow are about to enter a month during which their actions could define their respective seasons.

What both parties can make of home league ties against Ulster and Cardiff Blues, and the final two instalments of a quietly encouraging European Challenge Cup qualification campaign, will determine how different this year really is, or will be, to last season’s gross underachievement,.

“January is massive, the turning point in our season,” says Lamont. “If we do well, we can go on to better things; if we don’t, it will knock us back. On a personal level, it’s also a massive month, as it is for all Scots-qualified players, because this is when people really take notice of you for Six Nations selection. Last year’s was a strange experience for me: obviously you want to see Scotland doing well, but it’s really disappointing not to be part of it. It was a bitter pill, sitting there in the stand seeing guys you’d been playing with two months before doing so well and getting such a buzz off the crowd. I know I will be back in at some point, I’d just prefer to make it sooner rather than later. That means keeping on doing well for Glasgow, first and foremost.”

From the long, hard days last season when he could barely manage either, Lamont has learned not to run before he can walk.

TV match
Glasgow v Ulster
Saturday, Setanta, 5pm, kick-off 5.30pm

This article was posted on 31-Dec-2006, 15:24 by Hugh Barrow.