Sam Warburton retires: It’s the abruptness of the news that causes us such sorrow

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Dan Jones19 July 2018

Somewhere in the drawer of my writing desk lie a couple of old tickets: crumpled, grubby along the foldlines where they were once jammed in a pocket, but intact.

They both date to the 2015 World Cup. One is for Wales versus Fiji in Cardiff. The other, England against Wales at Twickenham: the fateful match that confirmed that rugby was not coming home. On both of them, scratched in black fineliner pen, is Sam Warburton’s signature. Today they feel a bit like holy relics.

Warburton signed them when I buttonholed him at a charity dinner that year. I felt sheepish doing it: even as a kid I’d never asked a sportsman or celebrity for an autograph. But Warburton was — is — special.

Record-breaking Wales captain, twice Lions captain, Grand Slam winner. Warburton never won a World Cup but he got as close as any Welshman has and never bleated about the red card he earned in that 2011 semi-final.

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The statisticians tell us he cleared out 1,536 rucks and made 132 turnovers in his 74 games for Wales. That sounds about right. Those who know him would add: modest, patient, good-humoured, humble, dedicated, driven. A world-class openside flanker, a pretty tasty blindside and a bloke who always put team before ego. Warburton was a defining player of his decade.

And now, alas, he is an ex-player. He did not exactly shock the world by retiring yesterday — his injury problems have been serious and prolonged, and the phenomenon of players crashing out of rugby, battered to pieces while still in their twenties, is one to which we are growing accustomed.

Like another modern great, Jonny Wilkinson, you always got the sense Warburton (right) was playing right on the limit of what his body could take, and his personal injury list bears that out: damage to both ankles, both knees, both hamstrings, a finger, both shoulders, his neck, his jaw, a cheekbone and his brain, in the form of a concussion.

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A telling image of his international career would be Warburton holding the 2012 Six Nations trophy aloft with just his left arm — the right was too crocked to move.

Put that together with Warburton’s basic integrity and it is no surprise he quit while the choice was still his to make.

All the same, he and all Wales had hoped desperately for his return to contest one last World Cup, in Japan next autumn. The fact that he will not is depressing. Midway through his testimonial year and there he is, gone, at 29.

The funny thing is that on the field Wales will not miss him much. There is a queue of excellent Welsh back-rowers coming through. Alun Wyn Jones is still standing, somehow, as a frontrunner to captain Warren Gatland’s final squads. And such is the esteem in which Gatland holds Warburton, he could be kept around the squad in an advisory role. Failing that, he will not run short of broadcast work, while those assisting with his testimonial, whose main beneficiary is the NSPCC, will appreciate the extra time he can now spare.

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So, the sorrow for rugby fans lies in the suddenness of his departure, not the sense of anything left unachieved. And the solace lies in the understanding that we have all been lucky to have had Warburton around. He has been a servant of the game who retires as a legend.

He is — and always has been — a true rugby gentleman who encapsulates the best spirit of the northern hemisphere. It is fitting in that sense that on the pitch he went out as he did, as a successful Lions captain in New Zealand, having passed the game’s ultimate test.

His real goodbye — though we did not know it at the time — came when he stood shoulder to shoulder with Kieran Read at Auckland’s Eden Park: sharing the spoils of a titanic series, while self-effacingly calling the most successful Lions tilt against the All Blacks since 1971 “an anticlimax”. Trust us, Sam, there was nothing anticlimactic about it.

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