Concussion has claimed another victim. This time 32 year old Ulster prop Declan Fitzpatrick has decided to call an end to his rugby playing career due to the concussions he has received over the course of the last few seasons.
Fitzpatrick was capped seven times for Ireland, with his last appearance in green coming in that game against New Zealand in 2013. He was long earmarked as a replacement for Mike Ross, but had a torrid time with injury and would have tripled or quadrupled his number of international caps had he been fit for long enough.
He is the latest Irish rugby victim to retire from concussion after John Fogarty and Bernard Jackman, and after high profile retirements of Craig Clarke and Shontayne Hape. This comes just a week after promising New Zealand prop Ben Afeaki also had to retire at aged 26 from concussion. Concussion has been in the news a lot recently, after Mike Brown, George North and Johnny Sexton have all suffered worrying blows.
It leaves Ulster and Ireland short in the tighthead stocks, but it's never nice when a player has to retire through injury.
Fitzpatrick told the Irish Independent:
I had a couple of bangs in succession, and to be honest, I didn’t rest fully. It was all about me wanting to play for Ireland.
Concussion is one of these injuries where you just cannot get it fixed in six weeks. But it is only in hindsight I realise I should’ve given it more time.
Everything is great now. If the protocols that are in place now were in place when I first picked up a knock I would have been fine for the last two seasons. The more you take it out of the player’s hands, the better it is.
Sometimes you have a mild headache and you are thinking it will go away, but it doesn’t. It could develop into what I got, which was concussion syndrome. I just had a permanent headache.
My family life was beginning to suffer and when I went home I was trying to hide it from everybody. As the season played out I couldn’t get on top of it and became a bit depressed.
This was Fitzpatrick scoring his last of two tries for Ulster in his career against the Dragons.
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