THERE was a lot of the feelgood factor around Scottish rugby in last November. One reason was that it looked as though the team had finally unearthed a back division capable of scoring tries. Optimism turned to pessimism when it was ripped apart by injuries, but now it looks increasingly possible all the key players will have recovered in time for this autumn's World Cup.
The final piece in the jigsaw could be Alex Dunbar, the centre whose recovery from surgery to rebuild his knee has been startling in its speed and seamless progress. Back from three weeks in the USA working with Bill Knowles – whose client list reads like a who's-who of international sports stars with leading lights from American Football and baseball joining the likes of Tiger Woods and Jonny Wilkinson – Dunbar is just waiting for the final all-clear to throw himself back into the frenzy of training to make sure he is ready for September.
"I wouldn’t say he [Knowles] does anything too different, but he is incredibly positive,"said Dunbar. "Sometimes you get aches and pains when you are building up but within 15 minutes of working with him, he is so positive that everything loosens up and you are raring to go. He just concentrates on doing things really well. It was a good three weeks. I was doing a lot of reconditioning stuff, getting back into some basic movements.
"It helped a lot being out there. I got back to running, change of direction stuff, and the strength I have built up in my legs over the last three weeks has really helped. I feel really ready to go out and do some serious conditioning and progress quickly."
It means that when you look at the potential Scotland midfield, Matt Scott has already said he expects to make the warm-up games, Mark Bennett is back in full training – both after shoulder trouble – and now that Dunbar is expecting to be back for the tournament as well, it is starting to look more like the unit that excited at the end of last year and was so badly missed as the Six Nations campaign petered out.
As Dunbar found out the hard way, though, there are no guarantees in sport. After all, you could hardly have chosen a more innocent activity than jogging gently down the pitch with occasional changes in direction, but that is exactly what Dunbar was doing when the knee went.
"It was the start of the last training session before we flew to Twickenham [for the Calcutta Cup match]. We were just warming up, going through a couple of plays and I tried to change direction ever so slightly when I slid to the side and fell to the ground," he recalled.
"That was it. It was just a weird feeling. My knee gave way. After 15 minutes it was stiff and the muscles had switched on to compensate. I didn’t know how serious it was – I could walk on it – but very quickly I got an MRI scan and realised I had ruptured my ACL [anterior cruciate ligament]. The week after that I got the operation."
From the word go, making the World Cup was always the goal, but he knew it would be tight and he needed luck on his side. Players are told the recovery time is between six and nine months, but there are not many who sail through without a hiccup and more than a few have run into complications that have put them out for a year or more.
So far, so good. "Playing in the World Cup is my goal but there are so many things that could go wrong. If it had taken longer to heal, or if I did not progress to rehab so quickly at the start, that would have pushed the timeline," he said.
"Everything has fallen into place and everything has worked well. Coming back from America I am in a better place to push on, do some conditioning and hopefully to get back to match fitness. I have been doing some running, change of direction stuff. It has all been going well. When I take contact is dependent on how the rehab goes and I have different schedules downstairs.
"There is a long way to go, a lot of running to be done and match fitness to be won. On the back of that I still have to work on the skills as I have not done passing at speed for four months now. I need to get back into that, get the feel of it all and try to prove I am fit enough to make the competition. I have to see a specialist in the next couple of weeks and hope I will then get the go-ahead to push on. It is just how it feels day to day. If everything goes smoothly I can get back to fitness soon."
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