Gloucester star will undergo surgery to recover from a knee injury that has caused him problems throughout the season, the club confirmed today.
The front row forward has been suffering from unexplained swelling in his knee and a specialist confirmed last week that he will need surgery to resolve the problem. At the pre-match press conference ahead of Saturday’s game against Leicester Tigers, George Skivington, the Cherry and Whites’ director of rugby, explained Rapava-Ruskin’s injury situation. He said: “This is not good news. Val will be out for several months. I don’t think we will see Val back before the season break. Unfortunately we have no idea how he got it, but he had an irritation that we thought we could overcome, but when we looked in it was worse than we thought, so we’ve been cautious and made sure he gets the surgery he needs, but it’s undoubtedly a devastating blow for us.”
On the frustrating story, Skivington said, “We tried to let him play a few games but we had to take him out just before the game or the day before the game and we could have gone on forever so we looked at it. Sometimes it’s dangerous because you can find things you don’t want to find, but we’d rather have a healthy Val at the end of the season.”
He continued, “Even Val has no idea what happened to him, there was no incident. He started to swell up and at first it didn’t hurt and we drained him a few times, but he kept swelling up.
It’s horrible for anyone to leave a World Cup camp, you want your players to go to the World Cup, but the positive thing is that you have them to play and I know Val wants to put his hand up and show everyone what he can do, but it wasn’t like that.
Rapava-Ruskin has been on the verge of playing in England in recent years. He played perhaps his best season yet in the summer and was named in the BT Sports Gallagher Premiership Dream Team after a year of impressive performances as a winger.
Gloucester don’t have many injured players, but the team’s leaders are all key players: flyhalf Adam Hastings is out for another five weeks or so with knee problems, talented eighth man Zach Mercer is recovering from ankle surgery and backrower Ruan Ackermann is close to recovering from a neck and shoulder problem he picked up in September’s game against the Barbarians.
The Cherry and Whites also lost Fijian star Albert Tuisue to a calf injury in Sunday’s painful 25-24 last-minute defeat to Exeter Chiefs. Skivington confirmed he is undergoing further scans but is not expecting any positive news.