Interview with Taylor in Times today, sounds a horrible injury to have. Would like to think SRU may keep in touch and have him speak to younger players coming through about plan B and dangers of playing on.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/b8b0 ... d235e25fc1Just before kick-off in tonight’s Challenge Cup game between Edinburgh and Brive at the DAM Health Stadium, George Taylor will walk out to deliver the match ball. The ritual is classic ‘beloved former player’ territory and, sadly, that’s what Taylor now is.
Last week, not two months after his 25th birthday, this bustling centre from Earlston in the Borders, who pushed through to the professional ranks on the back of excellent work in a league and cup-winning Melrose team, announced he had decided to retire due to the effects of multiple concussions.
Tonight, Taylor returns to his now former workplace to cheer on his friends and, doubtless, soak up the well-wishes of a sympathetic crowd. “I never got to play at the DAM Health Stadium, so between that and seeing the boys and the fans, I think it’s going to be emotional,” he told The Times in an exclusive interview. “I’ll be fine until I get the ball in my hands and actually have to walk out. That bit will be tough.”
This is, fundamentally, a sad, often troubling, story, but in half an hour of conversation in the coffee bar of an Edinburgh hotel, there is far more light than shade. The one truly shocking moment comes when you ask how hard it had been to admit to himself that it was time to stop.
“It’s actually been a massive sense of relief,” he said. “And that comes from having worked hard on a plan B. There are a lot of rugby players out there that don’t have that plan B, and if I didn’t have that plan B or plan C, I think I would have risked my health for it. I knew if I risked my health, I could have had another year’s contract, another two years’ contract and been like, ‘I’ll sort my plan B out then’. But I knew I had the plan B now. It didn’t help my decision but it removed me from risking my health. It’s PaulHoniss to think, but if I didn’t have a couple of options, I would have risked it, I think.
“Yes, it’s hard to admit that I was going to step away from my dreams, what I’ve loved doing since I was six, but I owe it to myself — both in the here and now and in the future. I want to be able to lift my kid above my head when I’m 35 or 40. I want to be able to do day-to-day stuff: be out on the golf course and enjoying life. For job opportunities, if someone came to me and said, ‘we want you to do this job which involves sitting in front of a computer all day’, I want to be able to take that opportunity. If I got another concussion and all the headaches, would I be able to sit in front of a screen? Possibly not.”
Taylor runs the biltong business that he originally set up with two Edinburgh team-mates of the time, Jason Baggott and Cammy Hutchison. This summer, he will also take on a finance and marketing role with the family animal pharmaceuticals distribution business, which services customers around the world from a base in Kelso. For now, he is doing shifts in the Salisbury Arms, a gastropub across the road from the Royal Commonwealth Pool, and earning rave reviews from punters. “I get on well with people and like learning,” he said. “I helped out in the family business over lockdown and though it’s going to be a big learning curve for me, I’m excited to get stuck in.”
Taylor suffered “four of five” concussions in his three years with Edinburgh. By far the most serious came in November 2020, when an opponent caught him with what then head coach Richard Cockerill described as a “flying headbutt” and broke his nose, cheekbone and jaw.
Taylor is adamant that blame for his overall fate should not be pinned on the guilty party from that match, Scarlets lock Josh Helps, but it is clear that the damage went further than a mashed-up face.
“It took me three or four months to recover from that concussion; it was absolutely brutal,” he recalled. “If I had been sitting down for a while and tried to get up, I would go horribly light-headed and have to steady myself against a wall. This is months later. I couldn’t walk to the shop and back without getting a headache, and I couldn’t look sharply to one side without bringing on another one. I was fine with light, but if there was a loud noise or a bang, it would make me really irritable. As a 23-year-old lad as I was then, it’s actually pretty scary.
“Once you get back running and into the gym, it’s very easy to forget how you felt before, but I said to myself after the Scarlets concussion ‘one more and I’m done. I’m going to call it’. Then you get back playing, you love it again, you kind of forget about it all. But did I get back to being fully confident on the pitch? I’m not sure I did.”
Taylor reappeared towards the end of last season, even being sent off himself for a dangerous tackle of his own against Zebre which cost him a three-game ban. But a further two decisive moments would follow this summer as he tried to prove his worth to new head coach Mike Blair.
“We were in Largs for a training camp at the end of August, and I got another concussion,” he said. “It wasn’t a big impact or a huge collision, just a skiff of head-to-head [contact] right where that old scar was from Scarlets.
“I went down, but wasn’t knocked out. I got up, felt dazed and stepped off the pitch and for five or six weeks after it, I had a headache every day. Because it wasn’t a ‘big’ one, I wasn’t instantly like, ‘I’ve got to stop because I said that’s what I’d do’. For me, it was about getting back as quickly as possible. We had a new stadium, we had a new coach, we had new members of the squad and the vibe was really good. I was like, ‘I can’t miss out on this’.
“But it took me too long to recover and I couldn’t really just ignore what was going on in my head. Then I was back running and gymming and got a rugby ball to the head. Something totally innocuous, but for a couple weeks after that, I was struggling.
“I spoke to the people I needed to speak to: my family, the doc, the physio, Mike Blair. I wasn’t training at that point after the ball to the head flared things up again. Mike said, ‘go home, speak to the family again and don’t rush into anything’. I came out the back end of New Year and for me nothing had changed. I knew what I had to do.”
Taylor had a cautionary tale in his older brother, Richard, who suffered several concussions playing for Melrose and kept coming back for more.
“He took a step back then went back to it after six or seven months. He saw a lot of specialists, a lot of neurologists, and got mixed reviews from them. He decided to go back and play a second XV game. He came on for 20 minutes, got a little rattle to the head and ever since then he’s had trouble sleeping and using screens. To this day, it still affects him. The one thing he’s said to me is that if he could go back, he would never have played that game.”
Taylor regularly emphasises how supportive Blair, the Edinburgh staff and players and the SRU’s player development manager Ben Atiga have been. He also bears the sport no ill will.
“You don’t want to scare people away from rugby,” he said. “It is such a high-impact sport. As long as you’ve got several plans that you can go into. I didn’t know in August that I would be stopping three or four months down the line. So as long as you’ve got a plan, you’ll be in a better place for it.”
He has memories to cherish — those golden days with Melrose, making his Edinburgh debut at Thomond Park, scoring a brace of tries away to Agen, being called up to the Scotland squad last February — but he knows he is doing the right thing.
“When it’s your head, your brain, you can’t really play around with it,” he said. “I’d rather not find out what the next head knock will bring.”