Discarded: Why Jack Cosgrove feels betrayed after a life-changing injury cost him career
Jack Cosgrove can remember sitting on a log in Pontcanna Fields, rain stinging his cheeks as he wondered whether to go home to a life of despair and worthlessness, or to end things there and then in the Cardiff park.
At his lowest, the former prop felt hollow. Devoid of purpose at 25 years old, with a wounded left eye that no longer saw and flitted out of sync with its functioning counterpart.
The training-ground injury that claimed his sight, his rugby career, identity and purpose, altered his appearance and laid waste to his professional prospects would inflict mental scars that only now, nearly two years on, are beginning to heal.
That day, in the Welsh drizzle, he thought seriously about taking his own life.
“I did think then, this isn’t worth it anymore,” Cosgrove tells RugbyPass. “I felt at my lowest. I was really, really struggling.
“When you’re in that mindset, it is bloody horrible. It was the nature of the injury, the lack of support and disregard for me, the lack of care, it all built up.
“And then I thought, if I do something here, my parents, my girlfriend, my family will never, ever be able to overcome it. They’d never forgive themselves. I can’t do that to them.
“Without their support, and this is something I really want to stress, things could have been very different for me.”
Much of Cosgrove’s story is harrowing. Some of it is shameful. He is telling it now because, thankfully, he has found happiness again, a new purpose, and a fulfilling pathway to better times.
At its core, though, this tale is about love. Love for family; love for mates. Love for the dogs that helped pull him from the emotional quicksand of depression. Love for the players who toil unheralded in an increasingly ruthless sport. Love even for the game that took his vision and so much more besides. Love – that which can conquer this most heinous suffering.
It was October 2019, four months after joining the Dragons, that the accident happened. Every little detail, each plot point on the timeline of catastrophe, remains etched in his memory.
The clash occurred near the end of a long and gruelling session for his sixth professional club. Cosgrove and a team-mate converged to make a double-tackle; the ball-carrier’s arm shot over the top and his finger thrust into Cosgrove’s left eyeball. Doctors would later describe the collision as a one-in-a-million tragedy.
Blood gushed from the socket like a river in spate. The eye immediately began to swell shut in a grotesque rouge pulp.
“I remember it like it was yesterday,” the Scotland Under-20 international says. “I can literally remember everything.
“I walked off, spoke to the physio, and he told me to see the club doctor, who was in Cardiff. I then drove myself from training in the valleys to Cardiff, which was absolutely crazy. I couldn’t see out of the left eye, and my right eye was closing up too as I was driving. That’s something I’ve struggled with as well because, God forbid if anything happened to anyone, you wouldn’t be able to forgive yourself.
“The club doctor said he couldn’t really see anything and to come back tomorrow or go down to A&E. I wanted to go to A&E to get it checked, so I then drove again to get to the hospital, and by then, I was really struggling to keep my good eye open. It was very dangerous.
“The nurse looked at my eye and went to get another woman. All this woman said was ‘yes’. All of a sudden, we’re walking over to the eye department at such a pace that I’m almost having to jog to keep up. The consultant on call looked at my eye and said they needed to take me into emergency theatre.
“I was like, ‘To save my sight?’
“‘No, to save the eye’.”
For over five hours, surgeons operated on Cosgrove’s eye. The long gash ran down and across the organ, “from one o’clock on the clock face to nine o’clock”. The damage was extraordinary.
“There was so much blood pouring out, they were literally cleaning it away, trying to put a stitch in, cleaning blood away, trying to put a stitch in,” he says.
“My eye was a mess. A complete mess. It was worse than they’d anticipated but they kept going. People say it’s their jobs, but they went above and beyond for me when they could easily have stopped, and for that, I’ll always be in their debt.
“It wasn’t until the next day when we saw the consultant that he said my eye was really badly damaged and I was lucky to still have it, and it might have to be removed in future.
“I saw him at 9am; the incident had happened at 11am the previous day. To just think, bloody hell, this is mental, less than 24 hours ago I was going to training and everything was normal.”
The sheer speed at which these horrors unfolded made comprehension difficult and acceptance nigh-impossible. For several days, Cosgrove steadfastly refused to concede that his career was over.
“I told the consultant, ‘I will get back playing rugby – I will get back playing’. They knew I wasn’t going to get back, I just hadn’t taken it in.
“I was in denial for a long time. I thought I was going to get better.”
Gradually, he realised he was now a former player. In these bleak moments, he yearned for support, he longed to know that people were by his side and that he was not tackling this horrific ordeal alone.
The Dragons paid the remaining eighteen months of his contract in full, when legally, they could have cut it far sooner. They arranged counselling, too, when it was requested by Cosgrove’s mother. What they did not do, he says, was pick up the phone and ask how he was, or check whether he needed their help in some way.
?RETIREMENT | @dragonsrugby can today confirm that prop Jack Cosgrove has retired from professional rugby on medical grounds with immediate effect ?
?? https://t.co/iLj4N1aaJn#BringYourFire? pic.twitter.com/qx5Blb3NAP
— Dragons (@dragonsrugby) December 5, 2019
Perhaps the staff and coaches were ill-equipped to deal with a player so stricken; perhaps they were simply swept up in rugby’s all-consuming churn. Their door may have been open, but for a person stuck in the depths of depression to the point of suicidal thoughts, walking through it is exceedingly tough. Cosgrove was left feeling like a spent round.
“You feel that you’re discarded, chucked on the scrapheap. You’re yesterday’s news. No disrespect, but I hadn’t just done my knee, shoulder or ankle – I’d had a life-changing injury.
“I didn’t feel comfortable going to them when I was in that hole, trying to get out, and you can’t see a way out. I needed them to check on me, not the other way around. I wanted them to come to me.
“At the time, I felt betrayed. I’d just moved to Cardiff; I was there with my partner but I hadn’t built a friendship group yet. They didn’t help me get to the doctors – they didn’t even ask if I needed help.
“I was going three times a week to make sure there was no infection in my eye because of the damage.
“They didn’t know what my support network was like. They didn’t know that my partner, mum and dad would never miss an appointment. They didn’t realise that my parents would drive two-and-a-half hours from Coventry to take me to the doctors and then drive home again, because I couldn’t drive myself.
“They didn’t know my parents would do overtime on the weekend so they’d be able to miss work to take me.
“It was a downward spiral from there because you feel worthless, you are just forgotten about. I did find that really, really tough. It was an unknown for the Dragons, but I want them to take learnings from my experience and have more in place to help.”
When contacted for comment by RugbyPass, the Dragons said they “take player welfare and mental health very seriously and strive to offer the best possible support to any player.
They added: “We acknowledge Jack’s comments and are determined to learn from his experience.
“Everyone at the Dragons wishes Jack every success in his future as he continues to make the transition from playing.”
For a ravenous trainer who poured everything he had into rugby, their lack of proactive support was a sickening blow. Cosgrove didn’t attend his last-ever day of high school because he had training at Worcester Warriors. He overcame ankle damage and a particularly serious foot injury at Bristol Bears that threatened to put him out of the game.
We talk often in rugby of cherished ‘values’. We get snooty when we tout the special ethos of our sport. But speak to many elite players, and you will find that rhetoric to be an edifice. There are fine coaches and caring clubs, of course, but the game is taking an increasingly utilitarian view of its people.
“My story blows your mind when you really think about it,” Cosgrove says. “You don’t even need to be a first-aider to know that if anyone has got an eye injury, you don’t let them drive themselves.
“We all like to say that this is culture, friendship, brotherhood – they are great buzzwords around changing rooms. Loyalty is one: ‘you put your body on the line and we’ll look after you’. There are lads, myself included, who have been absolutely knackered from a weekend game and been told by a club, ‘We need you to train today’. You train, but then when it’s the other way around and you need them, they’re not there.
“We need to see rugby for what it is. It is a business now. That’s fine, but let’s not sprinkle it with stardust. It is a business and it’s about winning. Let’s not make out that it’s all about being a good bloke, because that’s rubbish. It’s nothing to do with that at all.
“If you have good people at the top of environments, you have good environments. I’ve been in those, especially at Bristol under Pat Lam, which is how I know that in other environments, it’s all window dressing, it’s just for show… ‘Look at us, we’re good guys, doing this for our players’.”
Cosgrove’s partner, Claudia, suggested the couple buy a puppy to keep her fully grown dog and her struggling boyfriend company. The responsibility forced him to function on days when he would otherwise have hidden beneath his duvet.
“There were days where I wasn’t eating, but the dogs were. It sounds terrible, but not getting out of bed, not brushing your teeth, not wanting to shower, not wanting to do anything.
“Every day, I knew I had to take my partner’s dog out because it was my duty. Then she said we should get a puppy, and she was a handful. I couldn’t just lie in bed because she’d chew the carpets and the sofa, she’s this little ball of white fluff and you can’t get angry at her.
“It sounds silly, but I knew I had to get up and take them for a walk. Then I was getting out for an hour of exercise a day, it started to make me feel better so I was tidying up the house, making dinners.”
Counselling helped immeasurably too, once Cosgrove had shed the macho predisposition to conceal his feelings. John Andress, his agent and himself a former prop, was a fabulous ally, as was Barry Cawte of the Welsh Rugby Players Association.
“Barry and John were huge. They helped get a grip on stuff. Barry was disgusted with what had happened, and it felt like I had another person on board, an outsider who wasn’t an agent or family. I spoke to a number of people and everyone had said they couldn’t believe the lack of treatment I’d received.”
When he got down to exploring new careers, Cosgrove found the options had shrivelled due to the scope of his injury. He is now classed as partially disabled. He had long been interested in joining the fire service, but unsurprisingly, that was off the table.
Instead, he wants to use his experiences in rugby to help those mired in its daily rigours – not as a coach, but an advocate, a confidant who has been through it all and can guide a troubled player towards the light.
“The treatment players receive, I don’t believe is good enough,” he says. “I’ve known that first-hand. If you are struggling, injured or not being selected, it feels like the world has ended because it’s your be-all and end-all.
“Psychologists come in for the Six Nations for a few weeks and talk about playing under the highest pressure, representing your country to the really top-end players. But what about the guy on a low-end wage who is out of contract with a mortgage and two kids? There is a hell of a lot underneath the top who need that support.
“Almost all professional players live very normal lives. It’s nothing like Premier League football money; they aren’t rolling around in Bentleys and Lamborghinis and they can’t live off what they earn in rugby. Playing-wise, it’s a short career, and you need a whole new career once you retire.”
Despite all of the turmoil, he does not hate the game, but he knows it needs to change. He says he would do it all again if offered the chance to relive his career. Should he and Claudia become parents, he would be happy for his children to play too.
Cosgrove is currently training to become an agent with Andress’ Edge Rugby Management, a brilliant opportunity he is determined to seize. He recently became a trustee for Second Half, the charity arm of the WRPA which helps players in ‘times of hardship’. He is coaching his local side, Barker Butts RFC, and loves the purity and joy of the grassroots game. And several weeks ago, he proposed to Claudia. The pair have set a wedding date in June 2022. The dark clouds are shifting and Cosgrove is emerging from the gloom motivated and content.
“I’ve got another goal, another aim, daily things I need to tick off, which is massive for me having always been in a structured environment.
“We’ve got a lot of stuff to look forward to. I really do feel that I can close that last chapter of my life. I won’t shy away from it. I will never forget it, but I can’t let it consume me for the rest of my life. I am lucky, I do feel very lucky, and it’s about making the most of every day. It’s been a blessing to have this role come along.”
He is speaking out partly through the compulsion to aid other young men. To show them that fronting up to emotion is not weak or improper. And of course, he still grapples with many things, most frequently and viscerally with the way that he looks. The stares at the supermarket, the unvarnished glare of a webcam on a conference call, the inner repulsion that sometimes grips him when he catches sight of his reflection at the gym.
“You glance in the mirror and think, bloody hell, look at my eye. I’m not stupid, it looks bad and people do stare, especially now with masks when all you can see are eyes.
“It’s black, it’s blue, it’s turned-in, it’s all over the place. You just think, Jesus, I’ve lost my career, but it’s changed the way I look, it’s had so many knock-on effects.
“You know when you look at me that I’ve got a blind eye. There’s no getting around that. Up until recently, I was still very conscious of it.”
When Cosgrove looks in the mirror, he sees the trauma of his past. In reality, staring back at him is a future filled with promise, love, and the power to do good for those who follow.
Comments on RugbyPass
Jason Jenkins has one cap. When Etzebeth was his age he had over 80 caps. Experience matters. He will never amount to what Etzebeth has because he hasn’t been developed as an international player.
1 Go to commentsSays much about the player picking this gig over the easier and bigger rewards offered to him in Japan. Also says a lot about the state sanctioned tax benefits the Irish Revenue offers pro rugby players, with their ten highest earning years subject to an additional 40% tax relief and paid as a lump sum, in cash, at retirement. Certainly helps Leinster line up the financial ducks in a row to fund marquee signings like this!!! No other union anywhere in world rugby benefits from this kind of lucrative financial sponsorship from their government…
4 Go to commentsTrue Jordie could earn a lot more in Japan. But by choosing Leinster he’ll be playing with 1 of the best clubs in the world and can win a champions cup and URC…..
6 Go to commentsThanks for that Marshy, noticed you didn't say who is gonna win it. We know who ain't gonna win it - your Crusaders outfit. They've gone from having arguably the best Super Rugby first five ever, to having a clutch of rookies. Hurricanes all the way!
1 Go to commentsGeez you really have to question the NRLs ability to produce players of quality. Its pathetic. Dont the 25mil in Aus produce enough quality womens players. Sad.
1 Go to commentsBulls fan here, and agree 100% with the conclusion (and little else) of this article. SA sides should absolutely f-off from the champs cup until we get fair scheduling, equal support for travel arrangements and home semis. You know, like all the european teams get.
23 Go to commentsI’m yet to see why Grace would be an ABs contender. He’s pedestrian and lacks the dominance required of a top flight 8.
11 Go to commentsGee my Highlanders were terrible. They have gone backwards since the start of the season. The trouble began when we left Millar behind to prep as the 10 against the Brumbies and he was disconnected from the team that came back from Aussie. We rested Patchell for that game and we blew an avalanche of ball in good attacking positions in the 1st half. Against the Rebels we seem to of gone into a pod system with forwards hanging off from the breakdown leaving Fakatava to secure our ball!
80 Go to commentsPot Kettle, the English and French teams have done it for years.
23 Go to commentsHas virtually played every minute of previous games. Back row of Li Lo Willie , Grace and Blackadder would be the 1. Crusaders issue is a very average 1st 5 who cannot run. Kicking in general play is also below par They need to put Yong Kemara in. He must have so.e talent for them to bring him down from Waikato. Hoehepa would struggle to play in so.e club sided
11 Go to commentsI hope this a good thing making all these changes!
3 Go to commentsThe Hurricanes are good, especially with a decent coach now. However, let’s be real, the Crusaders and Chiefs are clearly a good degree weaker without the players they’ve lost overseas now. The Canes lost one player. It’s also why the aussie teams ‘seem’ to be stronger.
9 Go to commentsOr you could develop your own players instead of constantly taking from the SH competition and weakening it in the process? With all the player and financial resources these unions have compared to SH countries you’d think they could manage that, or is weakening the SH comps and their national sides an added bonus? Probably.
3 Go to commentsNot so fast Aaron, we might need you in black yet lol. God knows he’d be a lot less nerve-racking than hot and (very) cold players like Perofeta. It’s really a shame Reuben Love isn’t playing 10, we’ve got enough 15 options.
4 Go to commentsAnd those from the NH still seem to be puzzled (and delighted) why NZ’s depth isn’t what it once was. Over 600 NZ players overseas, that’s insane. This sort of deal is why Super Rugby coaches have admitted they struggle now to find enough quality to fill out their squads.
6 Go to commentsArticle intéressant ! La question devrait régulièrement se poser pour les jeunes français originaires de Nouvelle-Calédonie, Wallis-et-Futuna et de Polynésie entre la Nouvelle-Zélande et la Métropole… Difficile pour la fédération française de rugby de se positionner : soit le choix est fait de dénicher les jeunes talents et de les faire venir très tôt en Métropole, au risque de les déraciner, soit on prend le risque de se les faire “piller” par les All Blacks qui, telle une araignée, essaye de récupérer tous les talents des îles du Pacifique… À la France de se défendre en développant l’aura du XV de France et des clubs français dans ses collectivités d’Outre-mer !
3 Go to commentsWrong bay. He needs to come to the REAL BAY which is Bay Of Plenty and have a crack at making the Chiefs.
3 Go to commentsIs Barrett going play full back??? They already have all the centers…
16 Go to commentsForgive my ignorance, I might not fully understand so would appreciate clarification: Didn’t the Bulls have to fly with three different carriers, paid for by the South African Rugby Union, whilst Edinburgh got a chartered flight sponsored by EPCR? Also, as far as I understand it South African teams don’t yet share in the revenue from the competition and are not allowed to host Semi-finals or Finals at home. Surely if everyone wants South Africans to “take the competition seriously” then they must make South Africans feel welcome, allow them to share in the revenue, and give them the same levels of access as the teams from the other countries. Just a reminder that South Africa has a large and passionate Rugby audience. Just by virtue of our teams being a part of these competitions means that more of us are likely to watch the knockout games, even if our teams haven’t qualified. It would be silly to alienate such a large audience by making them feel unwelcome.
23 Go to commentsFirst of all. This guy is very much behind the curve. All the bleating, whingeing, whining and moaning took place days ago already. Not adding anything to the topic other than more bleating, whingeing, whining and moaning. 🍼 Second of all, not one mention of the fact that South African teams can’t get home semi finals or finals. The tournament was undermined and devalued by the administrators. 🤡 Thirdly, football teams often have to juggle selections in mid week games, premier games, champions league games etc. and will from time to time prioritize certain titles over others. 🐒 And lastly FEK Neil, and anyone else for that matter, for insisting on telling teams how to manage themselves. If they make what is largely a business decision that suits them and doesn’t suit you - tough shite. 💩 It’s not rocket science as to why the Bulls did what they did. If this guy is too slow to figure it out (and is deliberately not mentioning one of the key reasons why) then he isn’t a journalist. He should join the rest of us pundit plebs in comments section. 🥴
23 Go to comments