Saracens captain Brad Barritt laughs off cheekbone surgery before European Cup quarter-final with Leinster

The photos of the gruesome-sounding surgery Barritt underwent on Tuesday led club-mate Sean Maitland to describe him as ‘The Terminator’

Brad Barritt underwent surgery on his cheekbone (Getty Images)

Saracens’ captain Brad Barritt laughed off a midweek operation to insert a titanium plate in his cheekbone as he declared himself fit to lead the European Cup holders into their quarter-final clash with Leinster in Dublin this Sunday.

The photos of the gruesome-sounding surgery Barritt underwent on Tuesday led club-mate Sean Maitland to describe him as “The Terminator”. But the 31-year-old centre spoke nonchalantly of the procedure, required after he took an accidental elbow to the face from opponent Joe Marchant during last Saturday’s Premiership win over Harlequins at the Olympic Stadium.

Barritt was awake throughout the 25-minute operation under a local anaesthetic, during which he had his left cheek prised apart from the inside with an instrument “like a shoehorn” and a piece of metal inserted to mend a horizontal fracture. He had played on after the incident with Marchant, before eventually being substituted due to a neck problem.

“It was much like a routine tooth operation,” said Barritt, who has earned a hard-nut reputation across more than 200 appearances for Saracens in almost 10 years since he joined from Natal Sharks.

“They numbed the side of the mouth, created an incision, used what looks like a shoehorn to pull your cheek back, scraped away to the bone and put in a vertical plate and then drilled it in. I’ve had a lot more painful things happen to me. It purely felt like a sore tooth.”

Barritt discovered something was amiss when he was with his wife and son last Saturday night, blew his nose and found his cheek inflating.

“Because it is quite close to the nasal cavity,” he explained, “the air that would normally pass through your mouth fills into a pocket in your cheek so that’s how it’s determined that it [the bone] is displaced.

“They [his family] are actually quite used to it now. My wife doesn’t even bother trying to talk about it. She understands how it works. And my son thinks it’s quite fun to play with it. I had a CT scan on Monday and it was decided that it was the best way forward. Regardless, I was going to play whether the plate was put in or not.”

Barritt will be crucial for Sarries without Owen Farrell (Getty)

Maitland, Saracens’ Scotland wing, commented: “We couldn’t believe it when we heard the news and then saw the photos. The next minute, he’s back training with the boys and shows how tough he is – ‘The Terminator’.”

But with Owen Farrell rated by Sarries director of rugby Mark McCall “50-50” to play in Dublin due to the quad muscle injury that kept the fly-half out of the Harlequins match, Barritt’s flint-hearted leadership could be all the more crucial against Leinster, the top-seeded team in the last eight.

“This is not a game you want to miss and I fully expect any other player within this team would do the same,” said Barritt, who trained as normal on Wednesday. “I would actually compare it to routine dentistry. That’s pretty much how it felt to me.

“The risk of the general anaesthetic would be the ill-effects are four to five days of being a little groggy and a little lethargic, and potentially the implications of the medicine and the pipes going down into your chest. The surgeon was very confident – he’d done it before on elderly people who weren’t fit to go under the anaesthetic.

“It’s maybe a little bit tender, but I can be completely 100 per cent confident I can operate and do my role.”

Saracens won the European Cup for the first time when they beat Racing 92 in Lyon in 2016, and retained it with an epic victory over Clermont Auvergne in Edinburgh last May.

They scraped through from the pool stage as No.8 seeds this time round, after a dodgy run of form in mid-season, but Barritt, who has few peers in England for his hammer-like tackling and defensive organisation, believes they will travel with “full confidence” to meet a Leinster side likely to include around a dozen Ireland players fresh from their Six Nations Championship Grand Slam.

“We’ve had to do it the hard way this year,” said Barritt. “We know what’s on the line now, we know we’re playing against the form team in Europe. However we know as the Saracens team that when we are close to what we can do, we go there with full confidence.

Saracens will be without Billy Vunipola (Getty)

“I said it last week when we went to the Olympic Stadium – this team has always thrived on these big occasions and going to these big stadiums. We got a taste for it last year, the semi-final at the Aviva Stadium against Munster. We were outnumbered in fans and in having not the comfort you have at home. But this team is galvanised by these experiences.”

Saracens will certainly be missing five forwards in the injured Billy Vunipola, Vincent Koch, Mike Rhodes, Will Skelton and Calum Clark.

And if Farrell joins them among the absentees – with the comparatively inexperienced Alex Lozowski thrown the No.10 jersey instead – it would remove the back-to-back champions’ first-choice goal-kicker as well as the loudest voice in the backline opposite Leinster maestro Johnny Sexton.

“It would be the same sort of aspect as Billy [Vunipola],” Barritt admitted. “Owen is obviously a fantastic player who brings a huge amount to any team he plays in. But on the flipside Alex has proved what a great player he is for Saracens and his performance last week was fantastic.

“We had a similar challenge in 2013, when we finished as eighth seed and had to go to Ravenhill for Ulster. It was probably an even more daunting environment in terms of a passionate home crowd. Playing at the Aviva Stadium is probably in our favour in that it is not Leinster’s out-and-out home ground. There will be a lot of neutrals there.”

The huge prize if Saracens upset the odds is a semi-final that would be played in England.

And Maitland echoed his skipper’s bullish words, saying: “We have got good memories of the Aviva Stadium, 50,000 Munster supporters cheering against us and this is going to be the same, except it will be a sea of blue.”