Tom Croft interview: ‘I know I can get back to my prime again’

Having spent most of the last three years on a physio’s bench, Tom Croft is just delighted to be playing again. He tells Chris Hewett, ahead of Sunday's trip to Stade, his aim is finding his best Leicester form...and staying injury-free

Tom Croft will play his 150th game for Leicester on Sunday (Getty Images)

Professional rugby players with a gift for gallows humour will tell you the only way to protect the body over the brutal stretch of a 10-month campaign is to spend some quality time on the injury list, out of harm’s way. If Tom Croft ever thought along those lines, he thinks differently now. Why? Because he knows in his heart of hearts that one more serious outbreak of orthopaedic trauma might well turn out to be one too many.

Tomorrow afternoon, when Leicester meet Stade Français in Paris in a European Champions Cup game of considerable resonance, he will make his 150th senior appearance for the club. The statistics confirm, cruelly, that the vast majority of those games were played prior to 2012, when he suffered a neck injury so severe that a less resourceful man would have sought an alternative career path. In the years since his return to big-time union Croft, 30, has struggled to string together a decent run of games. Until now.

This will be his 13th involvement in 15 matches – a body of work that seemed beyond him when, having returned to this tough old sport with a metal plate and a handful of screws filling the space where his C6 vertebra used to be, he promptly mangled the cruciate ligament in a knee and disappeared from view for another few bitterly frustrating months. He is, to put it mildly, pleased with his progress.

“Twelve games in half a season after about 10 in three years?” he says. “You can call that a step forward, I think.

“My aim at the start of the season was to play for this club for the whole of the campaign and it hasn’t changed: that’s absolutely all I want to think about right now. There are parts of my game that simply aren’t up to scratch at the moment, so I wasn’t expecting any calls from the England coaches ahead of the Six Nations. But if I’m nowhere near where I was in my prime in certain respects, I’m convinced that my prime is re-available to me if I make the right improvements. That’s how I’m approaching it.”

All of which will be music of the most sublime variety to the ears of Eddie Jones, the new red-rose head coach. There is a whole bunch of blind-side flankers in the Premiership who might do a job for Jones at international level – Chris Robshaw, James Haskell and Tom Wood spring immediately to mind, as do the naturalised Zimbabweans Dave Ewers and Mike Williams, the versatile Maro Itoje and one or two others – but Croft in his pomp is something to behold. Ask the British & Irish Lions, who capped him in South Africa in 2009 and again in Australia four years later.


 Croft making a break against Munster in the European Champions Cup last month
 (Getty Images)

We are talking here of a player blessed with all the gifts bar one: a talent for staying in one piece. When it comes to the line-out, he is as potent a ball-winner as any back-rower in the game; when it comes to versatility, his capacity to operate across the back row as well as in the engine room makes him rarer than radium.

As for pace… let’s put it this way: Aaron Mauger, the former All Black centre now coaching at Leicester, once described Croft as the fastest loose forward he had ever seen. Not to put too fine a point on it, Mauger hails from the country that gave Michael Jones to the world and played both provincial and Test rugby with a bloke by the name of McCaw, who was no one’s idea of a snail in his youth.

Next year, the Lions return to silver-ferned territory for the first time since 2005 – the kind of trip Croft might fancy, given his habit of playing high-quality rugby just when the relevant selectors are at their most attentive. He smiles at the thought. “A third Lions tour? That would be something to cherish,” he says, in a tone that suggests he will give it his very best shot.

Not that he is in any danger of putting the cart before the horse. To give himself a Lions chance, he will have to work his way back into the England set-up – ideally for the four-Test autumn series at Twickenham; certainly by the time the 2017 Six Nations comes around. And to do that, he will have to play the house down for Leicester, in both domestic and European competition. This is his one and only priority as things stand.

“Over and above everything else – the international ambitions, the Lions and all the rest of it – I have an overwhelming desire to perform for the Tigers,” he says. “The thought of playing here, alongside my friends, was the thing that helped me through the bad times. There might have been a question mark over my ability to get back, but there was never any doubting my desire to get back. I knew I wanted to give it another go.

“The thing is, I love playing rugby and I love this club. If I hate anything, it’s the feeling of embarrassment when you’re not actually contributing. It’s about achieving things with your mates, isn’t it? As much as you want to do it for yourself, you also want to feel you’re doing it for them. When you can’t participate, it’s a hard thing to handle – especially when the injuries mount up in the way they did.

“To miss one year is annoying; to miss two is bad luck; to miss three is ridiculous. But at least I had the really serious problem first. Having recovered from the neck injury, which was a tough thing to go through, the stuff that followed seemed pretty manageable by comparison.”

Has he had to rethink his approach, in the way Lawrence Dallaglio (to whom he bears some resemblance, stylistically speaking) remodelled his rugby following significant injury setbacks? “There’s been nothing too drastic,” he replies. “My pace is still there. That’s the main thing.”

Having survived his brush with catastrophe – following the necessary surgery on his neck, his specialist informed him that he had been as close to paralysis as it was humanly possible to get – Croft would probably be playing with a smile on his face if Leicester were leaking 30 points a game. As it happens, the Midlanders are showing signs of resurgence after finding themselves in something of a downturn.

“There’s been a shift of emphasis at the club in terms of how we play – it’s there for all to see,” he says, enthusiastically. “I think we were a bit low last season: while we felt we had a Plan A that could work for us, we also felt we’d be buggered if it didn’t work. Now, we’re playing with our heads up. I certainly feel the change playing in the back row and it suits me. It fits in with the way I’ve always set out to play my rugby.

“I think there’s a sense of enjoyment about the place now that hasn’t always been evident over the last three seasons or so. People are completely up for it, which is always a sign. The trough we were in was a product of frustration, primarily. When you play for Leicester there’s a lot of pressure to perform and to achieve, and while we were keeping ourselves in the hunt for titles, we kept falling short by not delivering on those last crucial half per cents. Maybe the spirit dropped a little, and that’s when the problems snowball.

“Now we make sure that we fix things straight away rather than let them linger and fester. The players are encouraged to be more proactive, to ‘take ownership’, as they say. The start of the week is the coaches’ time – that’s when they put the structure in place. By the middle of the week, it’s about us. We’ve all bought into it and we’re benefiting as a result.”

Just lately, Croft the blind-side dynamo has been transformed into Croft the open-side scavenger. Given the new England hierarchy’s preference for positional specialists, is this the moment for versatility?

“I know I’m not an out-and-out No 7,” he says, laughing. “At best, I’m a six and a half, to use the dreaded term of the moment. How do I see myself? As a No 6. What number will I wear if it means playing for Leicester? Whatever one they ask me to wear.”